Mobile Applications Lesson 007: Location Services

What are the three basic types of location services?

Course positioning, Global Positioning System, Indoor Positioning System.

What does GPS stand for?

Global Positioning System.

What does IPS stand for?

Indoor Positioning System.

What is coarse positioning?

The oldest method of using positioning using mobile phones.

How is the utilization of coarse positioning achieved?

By triangulating location from a device to three or more cellular towers.

How accurate is coarse positioning?

Within about 2 city blocks of actual device location.

Global Positioning System

Space-based radio navigation system consisting of a constellation of satellites and a network of ground stations that’s used for monitoring and control purposes.

How many GPS satellites are there orbiting the Earth?

32.

At what altitude do GPS satellites orbit the Earth?

~11,000 miles.

What orbit are GPS satellites considered to be in?

Medium Earth <term>.

What information can be provided to the user through the utilization of GPS satellites?

Location, speed, and time.

What is needed to access data from GPS satellites?

A GPS receiver.

What do most modern smartphones and mobile devices have for GPS functionality?

A GPS receiver.

What do most modern smartphones and mobile devices have for GPS functionality?

A GPS receiver.

What does aW stand for?

Attawatts.

What is the strength of GPS signals?

150 aW.

On a device that has full GPS functionality, how does a user utilize GPS?

By turning it on in the settings of a mobile device.

What is important to keep in mind when using GPS functionality on a mobile device?

What applications you allow to access your current location.

Indoor Positioning System

Allows device to be used indoors and still be able to figure out where a user is.

How does IPS determine device location without the use of GPS satellites when a clear line of sight to the sky is not available?

By using cellular radio towers, Wi-Fi access points, Bluetooth, and RFID to triangulate location

What should a user do if they want to protect their privacy and don’t want to share their location through the use of IPS in a building?

Disable it in locations services.

Geo-Tracking

Tracking of someone’s location over a given amount of time based on where they are.

How can geo-tracking be achieved?

Through the use of coarse positioning, GPS, and/or IPS.

How can someone ensure that they cannot be geo-tracked?

By disabling GPS and IPS.

How can a mobile device still have some sort of rough location functionality even if it doesn’t have a GPS receiver?

Based on the location of different wireless networks the device connects to.

Geotagging

GPS coordinates inside of photos.

What does a mobile device camera do by default whenever it’s used to take a picture?

Embeds the location of where the photo was taken in the metadata of the picture.

How are the privacy concerns of geotagging mitigated or avoided when taking pictures using a mobile device?

By disabling the ability for the camera app installed to store the GPS location of a photo in the photo metadata.

What is the privacy reality when it comes to location services?

They cannot be turned off completely.

Why is it made impossible to completely turn off location services?

Because organizations commonly use it as an authentication factor to determine if a user’s account has been hacked.