The Reason Why Companies Track Your Location
During my research, I will be answering, “Why do companies track people’s information, such as location for information?” Below are two articles that will help me in the process of answering this question.
In the first article, “Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret” by Jennifer Valentino, allows us to understand that your smartphone is always tracking your location and your device will end up gathering information and selling the information without your consent (Valentino, 4). These smartphones will update your location and information every second with millions of people’s information. According to the New York Times, “At least 75 companies receive anonymous, precise location data from apps whose users enable location services to get local news and weather or other information” (Valentino, 8). The data showed by the article makes me realize that location services are tracked more than we expect, making it a safety problem for our personal information. The reason why location services are tracked is because businesses seem to be more interested in patters of a person, rather than their identity (Valentino, 10). The reason why companies like to track information is because location reveals some of the most intimate details of someone’s life (Valentino, 11). This article is very trustable because it is published by the New York Times with multiple educated authors. This article also had a very interactive aspect which allowed me to understand what was happening better meaning that they spent extra time in making sure that the article was understandable and correct on the information.
The second article I found, is titled, “Tell Me Where You Are and I’ll Tell You What You Want: Using Location Data to Improve Marketing Decisions”, by Martin Spann discusses that location based advertising has become more popular in the recent years because location data has become so much easier to access (Spann, 31). Companies access people’s location through their smartphones’ sensors and GPS functions (Spann, 32). After collecting people’s location, companies will use this information to make their marketing more effective for their customers. They will use the location to adjust prices, advertising, store layouts, and the location of stores (Spann, 35–36). This article is very reliable because the person who wrote this article is a professor in a university in Germany. The professor, Spann, teaches Electronic and Market Commerce which is very useful for this type of research. This article also has lots of charts to allow the reader to understand information in multiple ways.
These articles both relate to each other because they both help me understand why location is tracked for a company’s’ benefit. The articles both focus on location services as an option of personal data. The first article focuses on businesses making money off of location services, while the second article focuses on marketing purposes and location tracking. They both helped me answer my research question in a more specific way.
Spann, Martin, et al. “Tell Me Where You Are and I’ll Tell You What You Want: Using Location Data to Improve Marketing Decisions.” GfK Marketing Intelligence Review, vol. 8, no. 2, De Gruyter Poland, Nov. 2016, pp. 30–37, doi:10.1515/gfkmir-2016–0013.
Valentino-devries, Jennifer, et al. “Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 10 Dec. 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/location-data-privacy-apps.html.