Advertisers Get a Trove of Clues in Smartphones

The millions of people who use their cellphones daily to play games, download applications and browse the Web may not realize that they have an unseen companion: advertisers that can track their interests, their habits and even their location. The New York Times reports.

Cellphones have a much higher potential for personalized advertising than Web sites, especially when they use applications with GPS to identify a person’s location, right down to the street corner where they are standing.

Eswar Priyadarshan, the chief technology officer of Quattro Wireless, which places advertising for clients like Sony on mobile sites, says he typically has 20 pieces of information about a customer who has visited a site or played with an application in his network. “The basic idea is, you go through all these channels, and you get as much data as possible,” he said.

The capability for collecting information has alarmed privacy advocates.

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emily | 10:11 PM | Localisation |
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