Smartphones, APIs & GNSS (Not GPS) Location Data

Abstract

How we conceptualize and rationalize location data on smartphones – particularly as a privacy concern – is vastly disconnected from the technical complexity of their content and meaning to advertisers and analytics firms around the globe. This chapter provides a much-needed empirical intervention that demystifies the life cycle of location data in smartphones in hopes of assisting critical thinking privacy advocates and scholars alike to think differently not only about location data, but also location privacy as well. This chapter begins by distinguishing Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates from Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) raw measurement data. It then discusses how chipsets, operating systems, and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) produce, curate, calculate, derive, and transfer the latter at the behest of smartphone Apps and their related advertising and marketing partners. Of particular concern to this chapter is how GNSS raw measurements are fueling industrial development of novel predictive location detection algorithms that directly challenge how we think about location privacy itself.