A Data Broker Sold Location Pings From Inside Gyms, Clinics, and Shelters
Internal documents show Clearstone Analytics packaged 'wellness visit' location data and sold it to insurers and marketers without meaningful consent.
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Internal sales documents obtained by Dead Pixel show that Clearstone Analytics, a mid-sized data broker headquartered in Delaware, packaged smartphone location pings captured inside gyms, addiction clinics, and domestic violence shelters into a product it marketed as “Wellness Visit Intelligence.”
The documents, which include a 2025 pitch deck and a rate card, show Clearstone offered the dataset to insurance underwriters and health marketers for as little as $14,000 per quarter. One slide boasts of “sub-50-meter venue attribution” — the ability to tell not just that a phone was near a building, but which suite inside it the phone likely visited.
Where the data comes from
Clearstone does not collect the data itself. According to the documents, it aggregates location feeds from software development kits embedded in weather, fitness, and prayer apps — a supply chain so long that neither the app users nor, in some cases, the app developers appear to understand where the pings end up.
“Consent flows down the chain, but accountability doesn’t,” said a former Clearstone data engineer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they signed a non-disclosure agreement. “By the time a ping reaches a buyer, it’s been resold three times. Nobody in that chain has ever seen the user.”
The pitch deck describes the data as “fully consented and privacy-safe” because device identifiers are hashed. But researchers have repeatedly shown that location traces are trivially re-identifiable: a phone that sleeps at one address and works at another is, for most people, a name.
The shelter problem
Most striking is an internal memo flagging — and then dismissing — the risk that the dataset included visits to domestic violence shelters. A category labeled “transitional housing / crisis services” appears in the venue taxonomy with 4,100 mapped locations.
A product manager wrote in the memo that scrubbing those venues would “degrade dataset completeness for the public-sector vertical,” an apparent reference to government customers. The venues stayed in.
Clearstone did not respond to a detailed list of questions. After this story was prepared for publication, the “Wellness Visit Intelligence” page disappeared from the company’s website.
No law against it
What Clearstone did is, in most U.S. states, legal. There is no federal comprehensive privacy law, and location data brokers operate in a regulatory vacuum the Federal Trade Commission has only begun to test case by case.
“Everyone assumes this is illegal. It isn’t,” said an attorney at a digital rights nonprofit who reviewed the documents for Dead Pixel. “The business model is the scandal.”