Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries
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Re: Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries
#2I'm confused, throughout the article it mentions contractors being in oil facilities. But it also says "Orbital receives location data without any personal identification information and aggregates it."
So how do they know these people are contractors? Or are they just measuring the raw number of people in the oil facilities?
Re: Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries
#3Well, I must say I didn't expect big corporations would get their "privacy" violated by tacking apps.
Do you think it's cheaper to just buy back the data or to set up their own cell towers and block the app traffic?
Re: Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries
#4How are they gathering this data?
Are they placing detection equipment at/near the target locations to monitor for cell phone signatures in the vicinity, or are they gathering from mobile apps who resell location data to aggregation firms?
Re: Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries
#5How are they gathering this data? Are they placing detection equipment at/near the target locations to monitor for cell phone signatures in the vicinity, or are they gathering from mobile apps who resell location data to aggregation firms?
Probably just buying it from carriers directly.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/us-cell-carriers-still-sel...
Re: Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries
#6I'm confused, throughout the article it mentions contractors being in oil facilities. But it also says "Orbital receives location data without any personal identification information and aggregates it." So how do they know these people are contractors? Or are they just measuring the raw number of people in the oil facilities?
They could get gps traces for each unique phone within the confines of the plant but labelled by random uuid. Then you can tell if a new one shows up, but with only locations inside the refinery you can't really say more.
Re: Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries
#7I'm confused, throughout the article it mentions contractors being in oil facilities. But it also says "Orbital receives location data without any personal identification information and aggregates it." So how do they know these people are contractors? Or are they just measuring the raw number of people in the oil facilities?
If you have lots of location data say in Houston, and then suddenly in a refinery that's not in their normal day-to-day location data you could assume it's a contractor being called into investigate an on-site problem. or if you detect increased activity from devices that don't have a history on-site. Not 100%, but then they're not going for 100% either.
Re: Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries
#8I'm confused, throughout the article it mentions contractors being in oil facilities. But it also says "Orbital receives location data without any personal identification information and aggregates it." So how do they know these people are contractors? Or are they just measuring the raw number of people in the oil facilities?
Seemingly a contractor would be a person who is not typically at the oil field but stays for an entire work shift. Other people would be on tours or probably execs.
They are buying this data off ad providers and getting an ad id and geo coords, this is what leads me to believe they are just going off volume of users in the location
Re: Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries
#9I'm confused, throughout the article it mentions contractors being in oil facilities. But it also says "Orbital receives location data without any personal identification information and aggregates it." So how do they know these people are contractors? Or are they just measuring the raw number of people in the oil facilities?
They could get gps traces for each unique phone within the confines of the plant but labelled by random uuid. Then you can tell if a new one shows up, but with only locations inside the refinery you can't really say more.
Or the weather app is selling their location data to one or a hundred data brokers every 5 minutes. Mobile monetization via third party SDKs is a big thing. Likely 100k different SDKs to choose from (a number that came from a data aggregator).
Add in mobile operators, etc, and recombine the anonymous ids with the help of LiveRamp et al and it’s just a simple data problem.
Re: Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries
#10How are they gathering this data? Are they placing detection equipment at/near the target locations to monitor for cell phone signatures in the vicinity, or are they gathering from mobile apps who resell location data to aggregation firms?
You can buy location data from companies that buy it from carriers, some weather companies, and some advertising companies. If you're an oil trader, you almost certainly have the resources required to accept all these feeds and clean + cross ref them for a couple hundred locations.