Posting here from an anonymized account about Meta. No one probably recalls that meta stopped most of their background location services(Remember Nearby Friends) on the main application ~2021-2022[1]. It was just not even worth a repeat NYT story with this much money on infra to collect locations.
But, this is basically after they figured how to do "good enough" location targetting using IP and a bunch of this info this guy talked about. You don't actually need a lat, long, just the 1 mile radius/city area is good enough to run ads and they have ALL of that.
This was why meta's revenue dropped so much after apple's move, they could not fall back to collecting precise location. This is the last game in town. You shut this down, meta's precise targetting will suffer gravely, ads will become flakey.
One last thing. You may ask, who are the businesses that need precise lat longs? are like this one[2]. These businesses are like whack-a-mole. They saturate the app market steal data get money and shit down when someone yells and in a few months and comeback again, rebranded and come back as another app. They exist not just to collect data but to act as an arbiter on who get eyeballs on IRL activities to influence behavior at the (Top of the funnel) TOFu. In the Worst. Possible. Way.
But, this is basically after they figured how to do "good enough" location targetting using IP and a bunch of this info this guy talked about. You don't actually need a lat, long, just the 1 mile radius/city area is good enough to run ads and they have ALL of that.
This was why meta's revenue dropped so much after apple's move, they could not fall back to collecting precise location. This is the last game in town. You shut this down, meta's precise targetting will suffer gravely, ads will become flakey.
One last thing. You may ask, who are the businesses that need precise lat longs? are like this one[2]. These businesses are like whack-a-mole. They saturate the app market steal data get money and shit down when someone yells and in a few months and comeback again, rebranded and come back as another app. They exist not just to collect data but to act as an arbiter on who get eyeballs on IRL activities to influence behavior at the (Top of the funnel) TOFu. In the Worst. Possible. Way.
[1] https://techcrunch.co/2022/05/09/facebook-to-shutter-its-nea... [2] https://www.joinpogo.com/