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Geocashing
- a wordplay based on geocaching - describes the selling of individuals' detailed location data.
Often done without the individual's explicit consent or understanding that their movements are being recorded and sold.
The benefit for those collecting the data is revenue from organizations wishing to buy information relating to the movements of individuals. The benefit for those buying the data could be, for example, better targeted advertising.
A theoretical example of the above would be a smart-phone vendor gaining revenue from selling their customers' location data to a fast-food chain - who buy the detailed history (date/time, location) to better target future storefront electronic advertising for specific market segments based on predictions from the tracking data.
At extremes, geocashing could lead to real-time location data being bought/sold, and people receiving personalized real-time advertising based on their physical location; e.g someone receiving an email that there is a sale now on at their favourite store - with exact directions on how to get to the nearest store from where they are.
The ability to track and analyze the past movements of potential or existing customers could be of interest to almost any company who currently engage in measurements such as customer's physical footfall.
Whilst geocashing has been practiced for a number of years - as seen when some European mobile phone users cross a national border and receive SMS "spam" from their operator - the capabilities of current generation smartphones - with integrated GPS (e.g iPhone4, Android) - allows highly detailed location data to be collected.
The potential to upload real-time this data via 3G or similar could well lead to the selling of location data becoming a highly lucrative marketing commodity.
April 2011, a media controversy [1] [2] erupted when 2 British researchers publicized that they'd found a database on iPhones that kept a detailed track of the user's movements - and created a simple application to display this data graphically [3] .
Additional media commentary pointed out that other smartphones vendors, such as Google's Android and Microsoft also stored location data. [4] [5]
Whilst the smartphone vendors might not currently be directly involved in geocashing - companies and applications already exist on mobile phone platforms that aim to deliver location-aware advertising. [6]
References
edit- ^ "IPhone privacy row deepens: Now Apple blames storing record of owners' locations on 'misunderstanding'". Daily Mail. 27 April 2011.
- ^ "Apple iPhone tracks users' location in hidden file". 20 April 2011.
- ^ http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/
- ^ "Android Phones Track Your Location, Too". 22 April 2011.
- ^ "Windows phones send user location to Microsoft". The Register.
- ^ http://placecast.net/index.html
External links
edit- Application to display location data history on iPhone
- Placecast - an example of a company engaged in location-based mobile marketing