Geotracking; Privacy versus Convenience

Written by Daniel Burns

     Geotracking is the act of services and platforms using location data gathered from a device either from GPS coordinates, IP addresses, and bluetooth connections, just to name a few. It has long been used as a convenient way for users to have a better experience while using mapping, friend finder, social media apps, and other services like Uber. But does all this location tracking and its gathering of data outweigh its good and convenience in our technology driven society?

    To answer that question we must understand why we love the abilities of location based services on our many devices. For social media users location services allow you to check in and tag a location to a post or photo to share your experience with friends and family. For families using people finding apps such as Find My (iOS) and MyCircle (Android), for example, make it easy and convenient to check up on your kids and family member locations aside from how intrusive of personal privacy it may be. Also for using simple apps such as Google Maps and Uber or Lyft which require your location to even function properly. These are just some of the hundreds of examples of how we use location tracking services throughout our daily lives. But Geotracking isn’t just location data based on just gps coordinates, it can be gathered from other entities such as IP addresses and bluetooth connections. For example, if you go to Google.com and you search for a local business or service it will ask you to use your location. Everyone will hit yes and in doing so you are allowing Google to use your computer’s IP address to locate you in your community and, nonetheless, your current region. Yes that’s right, by even visiting sites that don’t even ask to use your location, companies and sites can see where you are generally located (city for example) to tailor things such as advertisements and specific services just for you. And all that data is out there for anyone to use whether for good and in your favor or for bad and malicious intent.

    Two major concerns have come up with geotracking and its respective location tracking nature. One asking what does geotracking actually reveal and two being what are my rights and what can I do to protect myself. Firstly, geotracking can reveal many privacy concerns in our daily lives. For example if you are going on vacation to, lets say Hawaii, and you post pictures to Facebook with your location attached, if your post isn’t private (only to your friends) then anyone with malicious intent, like burglars, can see and they will now know that they can take their time cleaning out your house while you are gone. Another example of privacy concern, a major one in fact, is when a big exercise and activity tracking app called Strata decided to celebrate how useful their app was, they posted a map of the entire world and all the routes users have taken to exercise with their app. A really fun and cool interactive map that showed just how big their user base was. But unfortunately it even showed locations of activity in parts of the world, such as the middle east, where secret bases of operation were, and it essentially blew those users cover. All because of a simple app that logged your activity routes. Crazy huh? Second, all this can be avoided if you always know, in the back of your head, that nothing is truly private and your are essentially always being tracked. You can either disable location services all-together on iOS or Android, or you can specifically disable or give rule on a per app basis (new in iOS 13 and now Android 10). This can also be done in apps on macOS and Windows inside of their respective system settings.
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    Just the act of being aware of geotracking can be enough to change your habits as a user to be more proactive in what you do. But for most things it's something that is inevitable and we allow it for the convenience in our lives. With ever emerging technologies using any kind of location based information we must ask ourselves, how does this actually help us, and is the trade off ultimately worth it.

Follow Daniel Burns on Twitter, @DBurnsOfficial

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