The company that just bought Tile, has been marketed as a great way for parents to track their children's movements using their cellphones, is a major source of raw location data for a multibillion-dollar industry that buys, packages, and sells people's movements. Life360 CEO and founder Chris Hulls says that selling data allows them to keep the app free. Last year the company reported $16M of revenue from data sales. Among the buyers are companies like X-Mode, SafeGraph, and Cuebiq that are known location data companies that supply data and insights gleaned from that data to other industry players, as well as customers like hedge funds or firms that deal in targeted advertising. Link
