
Placer.ai: Visibility into consumer foot-traffic - wallflower
https://www.placer.ai/
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Etheryte
> Deployed into millions of devices via 500+ mobile apps

A straight up in your face example of why the current wild west approach to
privacy is simply not sustainable. A company can embed their tracking along
with what ever it is that end users actually wanted to install, no questions
asked. Saying this is covered by the ToS is not convincing, this should simply
be illegal.

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kgraves
This is absolutely disgusting, developers, please don't install this in your
apps, please don't fuel the surveillance economy.

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king_magic
Flagged. There should be no place in our society for privacy vampires like
this company.

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amelius
How do they collect this information?

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sambf
It seems to be embedded into a mobile app SDK, deployed on 20M+ devices [0].

[0] [https://www.placer.ai/resources/our-
data/](https://www.placer.ai/resources/our-data/)

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Giorgi
Deployed how? Why are they hiding main information?

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sureklix
Good question. According to Venture Beat they have their SDK installed in top
100 apps in 2018.

[https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/24/placer-ai-
raises-4-millio...](https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/24/placer-ai-
raises-4-million-to-use-ai-to-track-foot-traffic/)

So then through app publishers, either intentionally or through an SDK
dependency that they are unaware of. I wonder how app revenue sources is
evolving over time. Could it be that "data monetization" is one the rise with
the proliferation of startups like this one?

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tootie
Is this just an ad? Or a warning?

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ThePowerOfFuet
Yes.

