Privacy and Location-Based Marketing

From the beginning, we’ve been in the business of helping app publishers and digital sales teams use anonymized location data to improve the advertising and content experience in their mobile apps. We do that by turning in this opted-in data into audience segments so that the publisher, and their advertisers, can understand the groups of people using their products. The end result of that is an ad that will be more relevant for the person seeing it, as well as potentially more relevant content to consume.

Working with location data requires a consistent and thoughtful approach to privacy, and we’ve always taken this commitment seriously. That means ensuring both the privacy of people, as well as securing the data.  Here’s how Reveal Mobile handles these topics:

Privacy for people

• “Anonymizing” data means not collecting personal details, such as name, email, phone, while putting the data we do collect into aggregated groups, like coffee drinkers and grocery store shoppers. We, and our customers, don’t have any incentive or interest to ever utilize individual details, and we don’t have any product or service that shows single data points.
• If someone choses to opt-out of sharing location data with an app or chooses their phone’s settings to limit ad tracking, we don’t receive any of that data.
• People can also opt-out of data collection directly with us, too, at optout@revealmobile.com.
• In preparation for the European Union’s new privacy regulations (more on that below), we rolled out similar privacy protections to anyone in U.S.

Working with our customers

• When we work with customers, we review our contracts to require that both companies are following industry best practices and regulations.
• We provide sample language that customers can use to notify their end users about data collection.
• We review their privacy policies to make sure they mention the use cases for the data being collected.
• If we learn of any issues, we work with our customers to get them resolved.

Following industry regulations and best practices

• Each year we undergo a privacy audit with the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) to ensure we remain privacy compliant.
• When we first started in 2015, we reviewed and implemented the recommendations of the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), and the California Attorney General’s office.

• We joined the MMA and the IAB, and today serve on MMA’s Privacy Committee and the IAB’s Public Policy group. We’re also members of the Future of Privacy Forum. By participating these industry groups, we’re able to easily keep track of and implement new changes to privacy best practices.
• We’re hired the firm ePrivacy to serve as our Data Protection Officer, and to help us further assess privacy compliance and security practices, documenting our entire approach from start to finish.

The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

• We never had any significant business with EU member countries, so we made the decision to stop collecting and processing any data from the EU before the regulation went into effect on May 25th, 2018. If we accidentally receive any EU data today, we immediately discard it.
• We used this new regulation to once again review our privacy practices, and enacted many of the same protections offered by the GDPR to our customers and their end-users. As a part of that, we joined the IAB’s Transparency & Consent Framework to help us prepare for someday working in this area, and to provide additional transparency for our company.

There are more privacy changes on the horizon with new privacy legislation being passed or considered in numerous US states, as well as new bills being introduced to Congress. As a part of the mobile location industry, we follow these closely, offer input through our member groups, and make changes as the industry evolves. Our primary goal is to help our customers better understand theirs, and to do so in way that protects everyone involved.