A look at the $12B location data industry, including how collectors, aggregators, and marketplaces monetize user data
Companies collect and aggregate location data from millions of people's phones. Tweets: Dani Homados / @homados : Most people I talk to don't realize they live in a surveillance economy. “There is virtually nothing in U.S. law preventing an American company from selling data on two million service members, let's say, to some Russian company that's just a front for the Russian government.” https://twitter.com/... Joel Eastwood / @joeleastwood : When you give an app on your phone permission to know your location, it might be selling your data into a $12 billion market of companies that harvest, analyze, sell and trade location data. Who are these companies, and how can you protect yourself? Read: https://themarkup.org/... https://twitter.com/... Jon Keegan / @jonkeegan : NEW @alfredwkng and I shine a light on the murky location data industry. We found a multi-billion-dollar market fueled by the apps you grant location permissions to. Meet the collectors, buyers, sellers and aggregators who make up the pipeline. https://themarkup.org/... https://twitter.com/... Roberta Fischli / @leonieclaude : People keep wondering why location data is so important. Well, let's start by stating that it's a multibillion dollar market. Plus, your location data tells a LOT about your habits. This is why we need alternatives to current data ownership schemes cc: @posmo_coop via @veenadubal https://twitter.com/... Sean O'Brien / @seanodiggity : Great work at @themarkup that adds more detail and context to the ever-evolving location #surveillance industry. In January, I investigated some of the same trackers with @U039b and we will improve our repository with this new info for @PrivacyLabISP: https://github.com/... https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... @torproject : A shadowy web of invasive, location-harvesting companies are buying and selling our data with very little oversight. Taking back our privacy is an active process. One step is to use Tor Browser, with built-in protections against trackers & fingerprinting. https://themarkup.org/... @harpermitchell : Today I learned AWS has a “data marketplace” to “make it easy to find, subscribe to, and use third-party data in the cloud.” https://twitter.com/... Dan Gillmor / @dangillmor : A reminder that your life is for sale — to stalkers, governments (to get around little things like the 4th Amendment), marketers of all kinds, and pretty much anyone else. None of this is transparent to you, of course. If Congress didn't approve of this, it would ban it. https://twitter.com/... Dara Kerr / @darakerr : Yikes. A $12 billion industry that's barely regulated. “Once a person's location data has been collected from an app and it has entered the location data marketplace, it can be sold over and over again” https://twitter.com/... Brendan Nyhan / @brendannyhan : The vaccines aren't tracking you, but your phone is https://twitter.com/... @alfredwkng : New: @jonkeegan and I set out to map out the location data industry. It thrives on being hidden: “They operate on the fact that the general public and people in Washington and other regulatory centers aren't paying attention to what they're doing” https://themarkup.org/... Julia Angwin / @juliaangwin : You've most likely never heard of these companies but they are in the business of tracking you. “The World's Largest Dataset of People's Behavior in the Real-World,” claims one company, Near Co. Browse our dataset: https://github.com/... https://twitter.com/... Julia Angwin / @juliaangwin : Google and Apple have tried in the past to crack down on some of these location data brokers in their app stores, but they have been known to pop back up after being banned. https://www.wsj.com/... https://techcrunch.com/... Julia Angwin / @juliaangwin : Many apps need location data to work — such as maps or weather apps — but then some also quietly sell it to data brokers. From there, it's a free for all. “Everybody sells to everybody else” Yiannis Tsiounis, the CEO of the location analytics firm Advan Research told us. https://twitter.com/... Julia Angwin / @juliaangwin : Ever wonder where your location data goes after you share it with an app? Welp, there's a $12 billion after-market for your location data. @jonkeegan and @alfredwkng have identified 47 companies that harvest, sell & trade mobile phone location data. https://themarkup.org/... Julia Angwin / @juliaangwin : The companies told us that consumers know their location data is being shared but wouldn't say which apps share data with them. “The opt-in rates clearly confirm that the users are fully aware of what is happening” said a spokesperson for Cuebiq. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This map is the culmination of a five-year reporting arc: the 2018 New York Times investigation showed apps sharing precise location with 75+ companies up to 14K times a day, and the 2019 Motherboard sting showed how cheaply T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T sold customers' real-time location to middlemen. What The Markup adds is the full supply chain — naming the collectors, aggregators, and marketplaces that sit between a phone permission grant and a $12 billion market.
Why it matters now: the quote in the piece about there being "virtually nothing" in U.S. law preventing sale of two million service members' locations to a Russian front company frames the industry as a national-security exposure, not just a privacy one — and AWS operates a marketplace that makes third-party location data subscribable like any cloud input.
First-order effects
- The firms The Markup names — including location intelligence shops like Advan Research — lose their main defense, obscurity: buyers and regulators can now see exactly who sits where in the collector-to-aggregator-to-marketplace chain.
- App publishers feeding the pipeline face immediate scrutiny; Life360, later shown to have sold its 33M users' precise location since 2016, becomes the template case for how ordinary consumer apps quietly become top broker sources.
Second-order effects
- Apple's and Google's store crackdowns force brokers to reroute rather than stop: by early 2022 experts judged those policies insufficient precisely because brokers shifted to buying directly from app developers, bypassing SDK-level bans.
- Data sellers start segmenting risk instead of exiting — SafeGraph's decision to stop selling visits to Planned Parenthood and other family planning centers shows brokers carving out politically explosive categories while keeping the rest of the business intact.
Third-order effects
- If the legal vacuum holds — no statutory bar on selling Americans' location abroad, with the 4th Amendment covering government searches but not commercial resale — pressure moves to Congress to regulate brokers as a sector rather than chase individual apps.
- Structurally, enforcement migrates upstream: when platform bans keep failing because brokers reappear, the choke points become the supply side (developer contracts) and the demand side (cloud marketplaces like AWS's), pushing the industry toward licensed, auditable data exchanges or legislative forcing.
The trend: Location data monetization is migrating from carrier pipelines to app-developer supply chains, with platform bans and selective seller withdrawals trailing the market rather than closing it.