Through my work, I have access to Placer.ai, which allows me to track foot traffic to any retail location or chain via visitors' cellphone GPS. Here's AMC's nationwide foot traffic from January 2017 through July 4, 2021.
Wow, this is virtually identical. If I were paying for placer I'd stop after seeing that you can get effectively the same data for free, assuming you just need the trend.
Yes, because after considering a datapoint of n=1, it's reasonable to extrapolate that the footfall of any arbitrary location correlates to the Google Trend graph of the locations's search terms /s
Movie industry is largely driven by massive advertisement campaigns. My guess that all of those spikes before 2020 were driven by massive AAA releases with big of ad budgets. Nothing like that happened during 2020. I think it's too early to ring the funeral bell, let's see a few massive releases first.
If that's true, we might not see it getting back to pre-covid levels for another year or so if it's going to happen. I think most the stuff we've seen over 2020 and now are things that were already in the pipeline or delayed. The lack of new projects during 2020 and early 2021 will likely affect the industry until mid to late 2022 at least, from what I've read that seems accurate.
A lot of those massive releases are Disney though and they seem to be going all in on Disney+. There might be the occasionally cultural moments that generate new box office records, but I’d expect say the average box office return of the top 20 for the year to be in decline.
The thesis that appears to be correct with AMC and GME is that the shorts never really covered, they simply kicked the can through some creative vehicles.
How do we know that? Is it possible that substantially all the active funds with a thesis on AMC/GME got out, so now the price is driven by retail meme buyers who have no price target?
Honestly, I feel that we're way past the point of productively engaging with the wallstreetbets crowd, the "Naked short squeeze" eternal narative is about as substantial as the people claiming Trump will be inaugurated again later this year. There's no evidence threshold that can be met - on an infinite timeline, the fact that these hedge funds haven't lost money is just more evidence of dirty tricks rather than the most likely scenario - they dumped the stock long ago, and either have a strategy to get back in or have a strategy to avoid being burned again.
20% of the AMC float is short, and could cover in less than 2 days. 25% of the GME float is sold short, but it would take a bit longer for shorts to cover, looks like 5-7 days based on avg 10d volume.
Placer is able to track cell phones that have an app installed that uses their SDK. They currently have their SDK in over 500 mobile apps. The data is anonymized, but it would probably shock people how much information I can get from this system. I just pick a location and I can see how many people walked into that location over any time span in the past 4 years, where they live, how much money they make, where else they like to shop, etc. I work in commercial real estate, BTW. We use this software to analyze retail properties.
I’ll go on a limb and say that apps don’t even have to integrate Placer’s sdk directly. If an app uses any monetization/tracking/ad tracking system, that tracking vendor may collect the geo data and then re-sell it to Placer (i.e. talk to Placer via a server to server API to let them know about the end user)
1) A device's location can be guessed with your IP address at the very least.
2) Wifi networks.
On iOS, I'm almost sure that apps cannot access the list of wifi networks that the device sees. As you may know, the list of wifi access point MAC addresses can be used to triangulate a device's geolocation (there was a related case with Google Streets View cars gobbling up that info[0])
On Android, wifi network MAC addresses may be available to apps? Is there a special permission that apps need from the user?
However, I believe connected WiFi information can be obtained on Android without location services enabled.
On iOS, I believe an app needs special permission even to fetch connected WiFi, and I believe you are correct that there is no way to access ambient WiFi scans.
> However, I believe connected WiFi information can be obtained on Android without location services enabled.
Correct, you need the "Access network state" permission (renamed to a more sensible "View network connections" in more recent versions of Android).
However, to my knowledge neither the play store or Android system warn/ask you about this permission so to avoid it you have to explicitly check every app you install.
A few months ago I chose a random set of iOS apps to decompile and view their included libraries. Its amazing how much tracking is going on. One interesting that I recall was a Bluetooth library in a convenience store app. Seems like they had Bluetooth beacons around there store and it would use the phone to track you as you walked through the store.
I recall the CVS app requesting Bluetooth permissions when I installed it. I can imagine them implementing something like this, but couldn't they just passively listen for Bluetooth beacons from people's phones using the devices in the store, without needing the app to be installed on a customers phone?
I suppose I'm not familiar enough with Bluetooth - I figured phones with Bluetooth enabled are constantly sending out some kind of "hello" beacon.
The beacons in the store are pretty dumb, so they can be cheap (on the order of a few dollars each) and plentiful, moving the real logic of tracking to the app.
You're correct in that it could be reversed and the BLE radios in the store could track the phones instead, but then they'd need far more intelligence and network connectivity, which would make them more expensive and in turn they'd be fewer of them deployed.
Source: spent the last few years writing code for wireless devices, including BLE beacons.
“The California Consumer Privacy Act gives California residents the right to direct businesses from selling their personal information. If you are a California resident, you have this right. If you are not a California resident, we may, at our discretion, grant you this right.”
Wow, this seems like incredibly valuable information for traders and hedge funds. There is a well known retail analyst (Mathew Boss) who famously said they take aerial photos of mall parking lots to estimate traffic and sales. This data is even more granular.
Yeah, commercial Satellite data "intelligence" is a big thing. (This is clearly the "civilian" version of what has been going on in the military world for a very long time)
I wanted to send this example as it's exactly what you're talking about -- monitoring of retail locations (as a data service):
"RS Metrics Boeing Tracker is a custom event driven monitoring product which focuses on the activity and production at Boeing factory sites. Insights generated from Boeing Tracker help investors and PMs' to optimize their investment strategies."
Among other things, they're counting cars at the Boeing Employee Parking Lot:
As I understand it, this is also how proxy services that offer "mobile IPs" with millions available function as well. Kinda makes me pine for the good old days where they just annoyed the crap out of me with ads.
Not really, not for me and many others anyway. I would just get an LTE modem for backup internet, my PC is better at everything else. I'm not sure about which sites you're talking about, but you can also do 2FA without a phone.
To clarify, I wasn't talking about them tracking you, I was talking about the SDKs used proxying connections unbeknownst to you using your mobile (or wifi?) data, which the SDK provider sells as a business.
It's crazy how much just having your location tracked 24/7 shows about you. It can give a pretty good idea of if you're in a relationship and sexually active (where you spend your nights and when/how often), if your parents are dead and if you're married or divorced (where you go for holidays and when you stop going there), what your life expectancy is (your zip code), if you have children (when and how often you visit schools, day care centers and play grounds/chucky cheese), what you do for a living (harder now that more folks work from home), how healthy you are (time spent at doctors/hospitals/fast food restaurants/gyms), etc.
Tracking one person's location history is invasive enough, but if they're also tracking the people around you it gets a whole lot easier. Phones spend time talking to and tracking other phones around them (even when those devices are offline or have location services disabled) along with being tracked by Bluetooth beacons and collecting info about nearby wifi connections.
It might correlate it with other vendors and signals (e.g., your trail of visited web sites, completed purchases, etc.) and also deduce it by monitoring your geo position to find where your “home” is (wherever you spend most nights / wherever you use your apps late or early in the day) and then use zip code area demographics to get the average income for that area.
Oh… and, credit card companies selling data (to these same data aggregators) on their members’ buying habits and most probably demographics as well (age, income, etc.)
There are other companies that keep track of that (experian, trans union, quick books, etc) that get this from everything from your employer's bookkeeping software to your credit applications. And they sell your data. So if they know where you live and an app knows where you live ...
You can buy this data on a per-store basis on a per-month basis from SafeGraph. It'll cost you $40 for YTD data, and it should include information about time of day and nonsense like that if you're curious.
Interesting data. What’s holding me back from going to the theater is that my child is not vaccinated (too young), although I suppose the delta variant is also a small concern. I wonder how much difference it will make when the under 12s can get vaccinated. I’d love to go to the theater again if it felt safe for my whole family, but it doesn’t yet.
https://i.imgur.com/s3H7EYj.png