Unacast

Unacast is a Norwegian startup company which is now based in New York City. It gathers "precise and verified human mobility data" using GPS location feeds from personal smartphones worldwide, and makes this information available to other companies for marketing and strategic planning purposes. They made headlines in 2020 when the company released its analysis of how "well" each state and country was doing at practicing "social distancing" during the COVID-19 scare. They did this by comparing the regular amount of daily travel of each person under surveillance to the amount they were traveling daily during the travel restrictions.

Unacast's CEO Thomas Walle remarked in 2018 that, "There are two companies out there that collect a huge amount of location data — and that is Google and Facebook. They have their proprietary location data sets. However they never, ever sell that data. That is theirs. So, for the rest of the industry or multiple industries that are looking to understand where people move around, where they live, where they work, where they shop, where they dine and how they commute, they need to get access to this data from another party in a structured and suitable manner. And that is the company that Unacast is striking[sic] to become." The company gathers this GPS information from hundreds of data suppliers, mostly app makers, who "for some reason [collect] location data but don’t know how to use it, how to make advantage of it"