
German Out-of-Home ads can now track your position (German) - tilolebo
https://www.horizont.net/tech/nachrichten/ooh-planner-walldecaux-will-out-of-home-mit-neuem-tool-addressable-machen-177444
======
tilolebo
Leading OOH company WallDecaux and mobile tracking company Adsquare have just
announced the creation of a platform called "OOH-Planner", to track people
watching OOH ads through their mobile phone.

The announcement: [https://youtu.be/hoxPJRoNp34](https://youtu.be/hoxPJRoNp34)

------
tastroder
Their website at [https://www.walldecaux.de/mobile-ooh#multimediale-
kommunikat...](https://www.walldecaux.de/mobile-ooh#multimediale-
kommunikation) only lists QR codes, iBeacon and NFC, while the article says
(translation):

> This is only possible because Adsquare's "OOH-Planner" evaluates data from
> 43 million smartphones in realtime in the background.

Okay, the tech behind this can almost be called trivial at this point, just
like data integration with whatever their existing database was, but how in
the hell is that not illegal, especially if they combine data into profiles?
Even if they hide it in some pseudo opt-ini legalese, I remember a lively
debate here in Germany around the time tracking garbage cans were deployed in
London, and that was before GDPR was introduced.

Edit: Removed rant about developers at these companies, because the tech seems
to be different than proximity based sniffing. According to PDFs [0] on their
website they use app data from a plethora of platforms and get anonymized
phone traffic data from a company called MotionLogic, which in turn seems to
get their data from Deutsche Telekom
[https://www.t-systems.com/de/en/solutions/digitization/solut...](https://www.t-systems.com/de/en/solutions/digitization/solutions/outdoor-
analytics/traffic-analysis-75652) \- good job privatization, the then
government based entity now sells your movement data to ad companies.

I really wonder how "anonymized" all their data really is after integrating
all of their sources. Feels like an almost laughable claim.

[0]
[https://www.walldecaux.de/smartnet#download](https://www.walldecaux.de/smartnet#download)

~~~
tilolebo
Right, and looking at Adsquare partners, you find apps such as wetter.com or
The Weather Channel.

So weather apps just track the real time position of their users and resell it
to adsquare? I'm really dumbfounded, but this appears to be true:
[https://www.technologyreview.com/f/612719/the-weather-
channe...](https://www.technologyreview.com/f/612719/the-weather-channel-app-
has-been-accused-of-tracking-users-and-then-selling/)

~~~
tastroder
Not that point 10, their list of tracking stuff, wasn't long enough to worry
about already but I fail to find real time geo data mentioned in here:
[https://www.wetter.com/datenschutz/adsb/](https://www.wetter.com/datenschutz/adsb/)
Might be that one of those third parties infers it via Geo-IP (let's hope so).

~~~
tilolebo
Right, it seems they only use tracking to display ads for their app/website.

But then I wonder why they would be listed as Adsquare partner for their
proximity targeting technology? Geo-IP can be used in some cases (weather,
events), but is in other cases not precise enough for real proximity
targeting.

Also, strangely, all Adsquare listed proximity targeting partners are apps or
companies that have direct access to their users GPS position.

