Brands Are Buying Cell Phone Data?

In lieu of the impending death of the cookie, brands have been getting creative about how to use their first-party data to replace cookies.

One of those brands is T-Mobile, the self-dubbed “uncarrier” who announced a novel use of their subscribers’ information.

“Right now, advertising is a little bit broken, we’ve created a new marketing solutions group to help fix that,” T-Mobile said, explaining its offering.

Essentially T-Mobile will allow advertisers to target its subscribers using its first party data that is sold to those brands.

At the center of these ambitions is T-Mobile’s Magenta Marketing Platform which enables brands to hone their media targeting using IDs derived from data generated by the T-Mobile cellular network.

Advertisers using the Magenta Marketing Platform can access the data, and audience targeting capabilities of up to 35 of Marketing Solutions’ partners to plan, implement and measure the effectiveness of their campaigns.

How are they doing it? T-Mobile updated its privacy policy to automatically share subscribers’ data with third-party companies.

While its subscribers are at liberty to opt-out at any time, get ready for a new era of opt-in privacy clauses from service providers who then repackage your data and sell it to the highest bidder.