Finding Similar Mobile Consumers with a Privacy-Friendly Geosocial Design
Authors: Provost, Foster; Martens, David; Murray, Alan
Journal: Information Systems Research (2015)
<jats:p> This paper focuses on finding the same and similar users based on location-visitation data in a mobile environment. We propose a new design that uses consumer-location data from mobile devices (smartphones, smart pads, laptops, etc.) to build a “geosimilarity network” among users. The geosimilarity network (GSN) could be used for a variety of analytics-driven applications, such as targeting advertisements to the same user on different devices or to users with similar tastes, and to improve online interactions by selecting users with similar tastes. The basic idea is that two devices are similar, and thereby connected in the GSN, when they share at least one visited location. They are more similar as they visit more shared locations and as the locations they share are visited by fewer people. This paper first introduces the main ideas and ties them to theory and related work. It next introduces a specific design for selecting entities with similar location distributions, the results of which are shown using real mobile location data across seven ad exchanges. We focus on two high-level questions: (1) Does geosimilarity allow us to find different entities corresponding to t…