Well, yes, let's say that your flashlight app requested your location data and you agreed. You were in a park during dawn and you were looking for the stairs.
And there were like 2 ads shown to you during this 50 seconds period, while you were in the dark and not looking at your phone but using it as a duh, flashlight. And then you stopped the app to save your battery.
Do you really think some advertiser benefited by using this data?
And what "independent" ad-tech is dealing with is millions of cases above. Consistency is important. FB and GOOG have consistent data, collected over days and years, properly matched, correctly aggregated. All others are dealing with flashlight crap.
That's not how it works. Do you actually have adtech experience?
Mobile apps are 1000x more invasive than anything on the web and these SDKs constantly send data in the background. There are also 100s of signals that get correlated to build single device profiles across time. FB/GOOG do have an advantage but that doesn't mean everyone else is useless and if you have ISP partnerships then you can actually get even more consistent data down to a device and household.
A lot of those arguing your parent comment's point in other threads here and elsewhere seem to magically forget background data. Out of sight, out of mind.
Use a simple app to track background connections on your phone (e.g. NetGuard or the like) and you'd be amazed at how much gets sent back to the mothership.
And there were like 2 ads shown to you during this 50 seconds period, while you were in the dark and not looking at your phone but using it as a duh, flashlight. And then you stopped the app to save your battery.
Do you really think some advertiser benefited by using this data?
And what "independent" ad-tech is dealing with is millions of cases above. Consistency is important. FB and GOOG have consistent data, collected over days and years, properly matched, correctly aggregated. All others are dealing with flashlight crap.