Experts say Apple's and Google's policies against location data brokers are insufficient, as brokers shift to tactics like buying directly from app developers
There is an estimated $12 billion market of companies that buy and sell location data collected from your cellphone. Tweets: @johnwilson Tweets: John Wilson / @johnwilson : This is absurd. They expect Apple to tell a developer they're not allowed to sell customer data they collect via their own apps/sites? After consumers have willingly given them the data? Doesn't work that way. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The platform crackdown began in December 2020, when Apple and Google moved to ban apps using X-Mode trackers after the broker was revealed supplying data to US government contractors. The Markup then mapped the $12 billion collector-aggregator-marketplace pipeline behind that trade, and last December reported that Life360 has sold its 33M users' precise location since 2016 as one of the industry's top sources.
Today's story is the counter-move: experts say the platform policies are structurally insufficient because brokers can simply buy directly from app developers — a shift John Wilson argues platforms cannot stop, since consumers 'willingly' hand data to the apps they use. The policy lever targets named brokers, but the supply chain runs through every developer.
First-order effects
- Apple and Google's broker bans (X-Mode being the template) no longer cut off supply: brokers route around them by purchasing location data straight from app developers, making the developer — not the SDK vendor — the enforcement point.
- Apps like Life360 that monetize precise location sit at the center of the gap: their sales are legitimate under current platform rules even though they feed the same $12B broker market the bans were meant to starve.
Second-order effects
- Platform enforcement shifts from blacklisting tracker SDKs to auditing what developers do with data collected through first-party apps — a far harder compliance problem for Apple and Google, and one Wilson's critique suggests may be unenforceable at all.
- The carrier-era playbook repeats upstream: just as T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T once peddled real-time location to middlemen before being shut down, app developers now become the middlemen's supplier of choice, keeping broker demand priced and supplied regardless of platform policy.
Third-order effects
- If buying directly from developers becomes the standard workaround, effective control migrates from platform rules to transaction-level regulation — privacy law or FTC action targeting the sale itself rather than the tooling, echoing how the carrier location trade ended only after regulatory pressure.
- The consent-based defense ('users gave the data willingly') hardens into the industry's core argument against any ban, pushing the debate toward whether platform-level permission prompts can ever meaningfully govern downstream resale.
The trend: Location data brokerage is migrating from banned intermediaries toward direct developer-supply deals, outpacing platform policies that target brokers by name rather than the underlying data transactions.