Etheryte 6 years ago

> 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.

kgraves 6 years ago

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

king_magic 6 years ago

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

amelius 6 years ago

How do they collect this information?

  • sambf 6 years ago

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

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

    • Giorgi 6 years ago

      Deployed how? Why are they hiding main information?

      • sureklix 6 years ago

        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...

        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?