Privacy

Protecting the privacy of users’ data is our organizing principle.

Ensuring Consent

We regard getting consent and full transparency as critical—every app organization we work with must get user consent to acquire location data.

Keeping It Private

We never collect personally identifiable information like names or email addresses using our sensor-intelligence technology—it collects only limited data and optional survey responses linkable to the user’s device. We also obfuscate data—for example, a user’s likely home Wi-Fi access points—for added privacy.

Masking Sensitive Data

We designed our service to ignore records of visits to points of interest that we recognize as sensitive, like locations we recognize as hospitals, doctors’ offices, or places of worship.

Frequently Asked Questions

How is user privacy protected?

We take user privacy very, very seriously. These are the tenets that define our handling of user data:

  1. Participating apps must get user consent to acquire location data.
  2. We do not collect any PII (Personally Identifiable Information) like names or email addresses using our SDK — only limited data and optional survey responses linkable to devices.
  3. Our SDK encrypts transmissions of sensor data to our servers, and we encrypt sensor data while at rest on our servers.
  4. We proactively obfuscate certain data to help us avoid inadvertently collecting PII. As an example, we obfuscate a user’s likely home Wi-Fi access-point names, as they might include the user’s family name.
  5. If we determine that a location is likely a user’s home (based on visit data), precise home location is stored only on the user’s phone and not on our servers.
  6. A user’s location data collected near their likely home is obfuscated before storage on our servers to maintain privacy.
  7. We obfuscate POI inferences for visits to locations that we recognize as sensitive, such as locations we recognize as hospitals, doctors’ offices, and places of worship.
  8. We do not collect advertising IDs if the user has enabled the global interest-based advertising opt-out option on their device.
  9. Our current SDK sends us data only from devices located in North America.
Why does Sense360 collect data?

We collect sensor data, along with optional user survey data, across multiple devices and apps to create marketing and analytics reports and research datasets that help companies understand their customers better.

We also provide mobile app developers with tools to create smarter apps and use sensor and survey data to improve our product.

What data does Sense360 collect?

We collect sensor and device data, which includes location, Wi-Fi information, accelerometer, barometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, activity, pedometer, and lists of installed apps, as well as advertising IDs on Android and iOS devices, related third-party device data, and user surveys to generate better marketing and analytics reports. We also purchase anonymized data from third parties, such as consumer transaction and location data that is not linked to any individual.

We do not collect PII (Personally Identifiable Information) like names or email addresses through our SDK. We do not collect advertising IDs if the user has enabled the global interest-based advertising opt-out option on their device.

For more information on what data we collect, visit our blog post.

From whom is the data collected?

We collect data from our app partners who use our technology to enhance their analytics and/or to help them build more personalized and smarter experiences. In some cases, we may offer partners discounts or payments.

We collect optional survey data from users who choose to participate in them.

We also collect some device and transaction data from third parties to help generate our marketing and analytics reports.

Our current SDK sends us data only from devices located in North America and does not send us any data when a device is outside North America. If you are concerned about compliance with the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), rest assured that our current SDK does not send us any data from devices located in the EU (or anywhere else outside North America).

What requirements do you have of app partners?

Partners that work with us must:

  1. Get consent from their users for the data they collect
  2. Clearly state in their privacy policy that they will share the data
  3. Not include PII data like names and email addresses in the raw sensor data files they send to us
How does Sense360 avoid using sensitive data?

We designed our service to ignore records of visits to points of interest that we recognize as sensitive, like locations we recognize as hospitals, doctors’ offices, or places of worship.  Although our files will still contain raw location data, we ignore those sensitive visits for purposes of our data services. We do this by treating them all as visits to generic, unspecified, irrelevant locations – not to identified location categories (which is what we do for visits to non-sensitive locations, such as restaurants). For this reason, visits to the locations we recognize as sensitive do not impact our profile of the device user.

How does Sense360 make money?

We use some of the data we collect across multiple devices and apps to provide consumer reports and research datasets to our partners. These reports combine data from multiple apps. They do not contain any foot traffic or transaction card data about specific users, and these data points are shown only in general and aggregated form to analyze trends in consumer behaviors.  Data points collected from surveys can be shared in individual form after identifying information is removed. In special cases, we provide an additional service to help a customer understand data collected through the customer’s app about the customer’s own users (such as help interpreting the location data collected through the customer’s app); in these cases, we may include individual data about the specific users or devices (such as that the location data collected in the customer’s app indicates that the user likely visited a particular brand restaurant), but not any data collected about those users or devices from our other customers. The service does not include providing any information about visits to locations we recognize as sensitive.

Learn more about how we protect user privacy