An ad company’s drones have been quietly collecting location information from Los Angeles residents’ cell phones for nearly a month, and there’s likely not much anybody can do about it without regulations in place that cover what kinds of data drones can hoover up.
Adnear, a global marketing company that specializes in collecting location data from people for companies looking to create targeted ad campaigns, has been flying a modified version of the DJI Phantom II drone over the San Fernando Valley in LA since February 4th, according to a company blog post. A sensor on the drone tracks devices by collecting data from WiFi connections and cell tower signals and uses that information to obtain their unique device IDs.
“The usage of drones for location data collection would tremendously reduce human intervention and ease the process of collating data in inaccessible regions,” the company wrote in a blog post. “Drones will also enable quick assimilation of a large-scale location data, which would mean faster new market entry for us, since it does take much higher effort at present. We are talking a new level of scale all together.”
Adnear wants to use the data to serve you hyperlocal ads based on what you’re near at the moment. The company did not immediately respond to Motherboard’s request for comment, and we will update this post if we hear from them.
If this still all sounds just a little ominous, that’s because it is. The sensors on Adnear’s drone are likely the same kind they’ve used on “bikes, cars, trains, and even walking up the stairs,” except now they’re flying over you. Using cell tower signals to uncover a device’s ID sounds pretty close to what a StingRay used by police to track suspects by mimicking cell towers does. That technology works by scooping up all location information from cell phones in the area, including those from innocent people
Adnear, a global marketing company that specializes in collecting location data from people for companies looking to create targeted ad campaigns, has been flying a modified version of the DJI Phantom II drone over the San Fernando Valley in LA since February 4th, according to a company blog post. A sensor on the drone tracks devices by collecting data from WiFi connections and cell tower signals and uses that information to obtain their unique device IDs.
“The usage of drones for location data collection would tremendously reduce human intervention and ease the process of collating data in inaccessible regions,” the company wrote in a blog post. “Drones will also enable quick assimilation of a large-scale location data, which would mean faster new market entry for us, since it does take much higher effort at present. We are talking a new level of scale all together.”
Adnear wants to use the data to serve you hyperlocal ads based on what you’re near at the moment. The company did not immediately respond to Motherboard’s request for comment, and we will update this post if we hear from them.
If this still all sounds just a little ominous, that’s because it is. The sensors on Adnear’s drone are likely the same kind they’ve used on “bikes, cars, trains, and even walking up the stairs,” except now they’re flying over you. Using cell tower signals to uncover a device’s ID sounds pretty close to what a StingRay used by police to track suspects by mimicking cell towers does. That technology works by scooping up all location information from cell phones in the area, including those from innocent people