Nearly all the players exploring the burgeoning Telecom Data as a Service field, or TDaaS for short, are reluctant to provide the details of their operations, much less freely name their clients.
But the rewards may outweigh the possible tangles with government regulators, consumer advocates and even squeamish board members.
Unlike other types of location tracking, such as beacon technologies that work only with mobile apps that people have agreed to let track them, many services employing telco data require no explicit opt-ins by consumers. Companies like SAP instead rely on carriers' terms and conditions with their subscribers, calling acceptance of the terms equivalent to opting in.