By: Eric Gundersen
Yesterday, top of the fold on A1, The New York Times kicked off an important conversation around privacy and data security, showing how a random app can collect location data about you, and where you go, without you knowing it. It was awesome to see the reporters use our tools to illustrate this need for better security and show readers how personal location data is.
Everything on this planet has a location. Three numbers — latitude, longitude, timestamp — show a specific place in the language of our geographic coordinate system. One ping gives you a static location: where and when. This is a moment. String two or more pings together, and suddenly you can see more: Speed. Distance. Time.
Everything has a location, but only things with sensors make location readily available to analyze: Vehicles. Phones. Drones. Smart devices. As everything becomes connected, this is a tremendous amount of data with incredible value for application in all areas of our society.
Together, many people carrying phones in their pockets in cars becomes traffic data. Traffic data combined with the time and location of a package becomes a real-time delivery ETA. Aggregated location data becomes a decision about where to open a new business, how to distribute transportation resources, where to build housing.
But people carrying phones in their pockets are also people. In their homes, in their places of work, in their doctors’ offices. From the piece:
Jails, schools, a military base and a nuclear power plant — even crime scenes — appeared in the data set The Times reviewed. One person, perhaps a detective, arrived at the site of a late-night homicide in Manhattan, then spent time at a nearby hospital, returning repeatedly to the local police station.
As a developer maps platform, our tools help people and companies use location to do what they do better, and in helping build these apps we also believe it’s important to help developers better understand how location is woven into the fabric of our daily lives. That’s vital because it’s too easy for data to be abused.
Read the piece, share it with friends, and continue the conversation.
Location on the front page was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.