Guides

Continually Making Privacy Our Top Priority

PlaceSense has reinforced its privacy credentials by joining some of Europe’s elite brands in underlying its high-level of privacy and GDPR compliance.

In the world of digital data, privacy is a basic requirement. So any organization dealing with consumer data therefore has an obligation, both legally and ethically, to ensure strict privacy guidelines are followed. 

PlaceSense has always been proud of the techniques and technology it uses to ensure its data and operations are GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliant. This is achieved through a strict set of privacy procedures and the use of unique algorithms to guarantee the data it delivers from millions of mobile GPS data points is aggregated, anonymized and meets each requirement of Europe’s strict privacy laws. 

A New Layer of Assurance 

In recognition of the substantial efforts undertaken to continually guarantee its GDPR credentials, PlaceSense has also become privately certified. This adds an additional layer of recognition to further demonstrate PlaceSense’s continued commitment to providing compliant and trusted location-based data.

As part of this process ePrivacy, a data protection specialist, conducted a comprehensive assessment of PlaceSense’s privacy standards and after an extensive technical and legal review, awarded its certification. ePrivacy also certifies digital products from some of Europe’s largest, most recognizable brands, such as Lidl, Audi, Commerzbank and Deutsche Telekom. This certification attests to a product’s compliance with the requirements imposed by EU data protection legislation, in accordance with GDPR.

With data security and privacy a top priority for organizations operating throughout Europe, . this new certification provides additional peace of mind. 

Puting Privacy First

Our commitment to privacy lies at the heart of all our operations. PlaceSense buys pseudonymized geolocation data collected by smartphone applications, only working with companies specializing in GDPR-compliant data collection. Each app user is asked if they are willing to share location data with third-party companies, such as PlaceSense. Only if they consent, data is sent to us. 

PlaceSense works within the iab consent framework v2, set up in co-operation with data protection authorities and used by other well-known German companies. This ensures a uniform, consistent and compliant data collection process from the very start. 

Once the pseudonymized geolocation data reaches us, we apply a proprietary process for normalizing, cleansing, aggregating and enriching the data on a geo-level. Our anonymization techniques ensure individuals cannot be identified in the data. We then analyze the behavior of the entire local population based on collected anonymized data and additional location information. 

Strict Privacy Enforcement 

While Placence’s proprietary algorithms ensure the total anonymization of all data insights, additional steps are taken to strengthen our privacy measures. 

  • Privacy Threshold: We only analyze locations where there are enough inhabitants, residents and/or visitors to ensure anonymity. 
  • Location Blacklist: We do not analyze sensitive locations, such as kindergartens, government locations or adult shops.

Adherence to these procedures allows PlaceSense to provide services in Germany and Netherlands to customers in both the private and public sector. The coming months will see this list of countries continually expanding. PlaceSense can only achieve this by continuing to ensure all its data meets the highest privacy requirements. Our latest privacy certification underlines that we take this commitment very seriously and will continue to deliver the GDPR-compliant data our clients need as our services expand across Europe.

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