How Location Data Can Be Used to Improve People’s Lives
At Quadrant Protocol our mission is to make data work better for people and businesses. We’ve built technology to achieve that, and are now focused on hitting our milestones and gaining partners and customers. So what concrete use cases are we working on that will have a clear impact on people’s lives? In this post, we explore the way that location data, using Quadrant’s technology, can improve the world we live in.
From providing precise information to help first responders save lives to helping businesses gain insights to better serve their customers, location analytics is one of the clearest uses for big data.
Here’s how it works: every day, millions of people create tiny data points about the ways in which they interact with and traverse the physical world. These data points are created when they order a latte at the coffee shop, or tap their phone to ride transit, or hail a car through a ride-sharing app. Taken together, these millions of tiny data points paint an incredibly detailed picture of what people need and want, and when and where.
This anonymous and aggregated data can be used by innumerable businesses, governments and other parties to optimize the services they provide. For example, a city government could alter its bus routes based on demonstrated commuter patterns. It could do this in a much more bespoke and targeted way than has currently been possible. This can be done with little risk to individuals, as the data is both aggregated and anonymized — it cannot be used to target a particular individual.
Location data allows planners to go beyond simply placing bus routes along arterial streets and increasing frequency during rush hour, to tailoring the service in a much more granular way to the needs of riders. Similarly, businesses, like the coffee shop in the example above, can coordinate their hours, offerings, and store locations based on actual data derived from customer activity. All of this should add up to a greatly improved daily experience for individuals.
But the benefits of location data go beyond the conveniences of transportation and urban amenities. It can also save lives by providing information to first responders. Google is already providing 911 call centers in the U.S. with more accurate location data for calls made from Android devices so that they can reach people more quickly during emergencies. According to tests, location data was successful in providing better location data to call centers. Google is now sending data to call centers handling more than 140,000 calls per day, and Apple has announced a similar service for iOS devices. Location data can even be used to hold war criminals accountable. These are major benefits to the public good.
At Quadrant Protocol, we focus on enabling a better world driven by data. Our technology allows people and businesses to map different data sets to extract better insights and solve bigger problems. It enables end-to-end data authenticity to ensure the proper use and privacy controls are in place. This model means that data can be used for the collective as well as for individual good. And that helps citizens to have a better life.
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