from the parent post: `social media and/or ad data`
So if you have ad impression data you have IP geolocation, or maybe better, along with the timestamp. Similarly for socials sometimes you get location metadata, and with image uploads you can can get location metadata (though today these are often stripped, historically they weren't).
Do people post on social media at high enough resolution to do this?
Especially since the claim was in 2012, is airplane wifi and roaming data reliable enough for people to view enough ads to do this?
Also where are you getting all a users ad impressions across different providers to have this kind of timing information?
There's a lot of creepy data available linked to ads and lots of companies doing enrichment with different fields if you have already have a real identifier for a user (e.g. phone number, email, cc, isp account number), but this sounds way more like "we created a load of hypothetical simulated data and pretended we had access to all of it"
So if you have ad impression data you have IP geolocation, or maybe better, along with the timestamp. Similarly for socials sometimes you get location metadata, and with image uploads you can can get location metadata (though today these are often stripped, historically they weren't).