Unacast Launches “Clear View Data Pledge,” Unlocking the Black Box Surrounding Location Data

Company Encourages All Data Providers to End Practice of Double Counting and Offer Clear View of Location Insights


NEW YORK, Sept. 13, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Unacast, the leading transparent and contextualized location data platform, today announced a new initiative designed to help location data buyers better understand the attributes and insights of a location data set.

The Clear View Data Pledge is a promise by Unacast that its data is accurately described, aggregated from trusted sources, free of the issues plaguing the location data space, and that the company will continually improve and update vetting processes to maintain these standards. These persistent problems include double counting, where a data point from a device is inaccurately associated with multiple points of interest (POIs) at the same time, the ability to understand time spent is not provided, which leads to inaccurate measurement of consumer “visits” to these venues or an inability to understand what they are buying. Unacast encourages all other location data providers to take the pledge and provide a crystal clear view into their data assets.

“As a Nordic company, we’ve been outspoken about transparency from the beginning,” said Thomas Walle, CEO of Unacast. “Our belief in the value of trustworthy, transparent data has been integrated into all of our product offerings, and this is our call to action for others in the industry to take a stand as well. Data providers should be able to provide buyers with answers and clarity into every aspect of the products they’re selling. The new standard has been set. We should all rise to meet it, for the sake of individuals and companies alike.”

In its 2018 Location Intelligence Market Study Report, Dresner Advisory Services found that two-thirds of respondents consider location intelligence “critically important” or “very important” to their businesses, following five straight years of increased importance levels. This growing interest and scrutiny on location data -- and the insights that it provides -- makes it all the more important for companies to be transparent about their data.

The Unacast Clear View Data Pledge includes a greater effort to educate buyers about the questions to ask and information to request when they’re shopping for a location data vendor. As part of this pledge, Unacast makes the following promises to its customers, prospects and partners:  

  1. We promise that we will never tell you that a device was in two places at the same time - and our product will give you the ability to know if we did
  2. We promise to provide all of the information needed (not just AdID, venue name and timestamp) within a dataset to assess its accuracy and quality through the transparency fields that you select, enabling you to become a product expert
  3. We promise that our platform will always maintain GDPR compliance standards  
  4. We promise to provide you with the ability to understand the sources of our data so you can perform analysis against them and only use the data that’s best for your products
  5. We promise to put all suppliers through a consistent and ever-improving vetting process
  6. We promise to maintain an ethical code of conduct in handling all data
  7. We promise to deliver data in a timely manner so you have what you need, when you need it - and if there is ever an issue, we will contact you proactively
  8. We promise to accommodate all data into a single standard format for your ease of ingestion and use
  9. We promise to be up front about methodology and provide you with the qualifications needed to evaluate our data

With a forthcoming guide book on the topic, Unacast adds to an already growing library of content that demystifies the industry, including pieces on transparency in products and common pitfalls that lead to wasted location data dollars.

About Unacast
Unacast is the only contextualized location data platform that offers full transparency into its products and insights. As a trailblazer in the transparency, quality and ethics of the location data industry, Unacast provides companies and individuals with the most accurate understanding of human activity in the physical world through the Real World Graph®. The company also hosts the leading conference on transparency and accuracy in location data; Real World Talks.

Unacast, founded in Oslo, Norway by Thomas Walle and Kjartan Slette and now headquartered in NYC, has garnered multiple awards for its platform, campaigns and for its company culture, including Best Company at the Nordic Startup Awards. Inc. Magazine has called Unacast “The Startup That Just Might Threaten Google.”

Media Contact
WIT Strategy, for Unacast
Rich Cherecwich, 774.254.0952
rcherecwich@witstratgy.com