ABSTRACT
Vanessa was tasked with deciding whether her company should use consumer location to find potential consumers. For targeting consumers with ads and news, location data appeared to be the holy grail of information. Location data offered more insights than merely where someone was at a given moment. The opportunity in front of Vanessa was to target people based not only on their interests and concerns but also based on where they may go in the future and who they are close to. Advertising was critical to the commercial development of the internet. In the 1990s, a brand wanting to advertise would deal directly with a website, aka the “publisher,” in order to post a banner ad. A key development with online advertising was the ability of technology to track and target individuals online with increasing precision and persistence.
