True, but being old and slow telco businesses they totally failed to monetize it.
Verizon bought AOl, HuffPost, Techcrunch and plenty of other media to build an advertising giant by pairing data with sites audience -- and took 4.6 BILLION WRITEDOWN on the whole venture [1] because failed to make it work.
> Carriers sell information about you to data aggregators, which normally require the user to consent before selling it on further. But some third parties opted to sell information, like people's whereabouts, on to bodies such as bail bond companies, bounty hunters and landlords. In its original report, Motherboard paid an bounty hunter $300 to get the location of a phone to within a few hundred meters.
They totally failed to monetize it for advertising purposes. Taking cases like $300 per single person location, paid by bounty hunter, is arguing in a bad faith, and has nothing to do with ad-tech.
It will be interesting to see how the mobile operators now try to monitize their 1985 - 2007 location data collected b4 GOOG/FB were in the game, will they just sell it to Google?
Verizon bought AOl, HuffPost, Techcrunch and plenty of other media to build an advertising giant by pairing data with sites audience -- and took 4.6 BILLION WRITEDOWN on the whole venture [1] because failed to make it work.
[1] https://www.recode.net/2018/12/11/18136127/verizon-aol-yahoo...
EDIT: oh and AT&T will learn the same lesson with their recent 800M AppNexus aquisition. Just give it time.