Location-Data Broker X-Mode Acquired By Digital Envoy
- by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, August 4, 2021
IP Intelligence company Digital Envoy on Wednesday announced the acquisition of X-Mode Social, which focuses on location data for the financial, cyber security, real estate and advertising industries.
X-Mode will be rebranded as Outlogic. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Joshua Anton, X-Mode founder, told Search & Performance Marketing Daily he will stay on as chief strategy officer at Digital Envoy.
X-Mode has an interesting past. The company was spun out of a college safety app called Drunk Mode with the goal of ensuring that companies have access to a higher standard of location data by tapping into a variety of technologies that most companies do not use.
Outlogic will provide consent-based location data to enhance its offerings in Fraud Prevention, VPN/IP Proxy, and Digital Rights Management Solutions. Digital Envoy and Outlogic have worked together for years.
Digital Envoy collects and provides customer data on internet users based on the IP address assigned to them by their internet service provider or cell phone carrier. It is useful in fraud detection, cybersecurity, advertising and other commercial applications.
In November 2019, X-Mode announced a partnership with the Anti-Human trafficking Intelligence Initiative to raise awareness around human trafficking at the 2020 Super Bowl in Miami. X-Mode provided ATII with location data to raise awareness around trafficking in Miami for this global event.
In December 2020, the company ran into a roadblock by Apple and Google when the two companies tried to stop X-Mode from collecting location data from users’ phones.
At the time, Apple and Google told developers they had to remove X-Mode’s tracking software from any app present in their app stores or risk losing access to phones running Apple’s or Google’s mobile operating systems.
Investigators worked for Sen. Ron Wyden, a democrat from Oregon, who had been conducting an investigation into the sale of location data to government entities.
