You Smartphone Becomes The Ultimate Tracking Machine

Location-based services market is a quickly growing market that will grow to more than $8 billion in 2014. It includes not only common outdoor GPS tracking, but also rapidly advancing indoor tracking that has been developed by many different companies in various shapes and with different technologies being used for it. So let us describe you some examples which will show you how developed indoor tracking is.

Collecting data

While you walk through the store, mall or other public place, your smartphone leaves so called digital breadcrumbs, and different systems collect and record them. This technology is called wireless fingerprinting. As a rule it is used with Wi-Fi frequency band, but other wireless frequencies might be used as well. For example, Homeland Security uses this type of tracking which they call GLANSER. This technology is quite interesting to FBI because it allows tracking people in places like indoor and even underground locations where GPS signal is not available.

Qubulus created another technology called QPS Positioning Engine. Their technology uses Radio Fingerprinting because every spot on the planet has unique combination of radio waves and thus it is unique by itself. This system can specify your location up to three meters sharp, be it outdoor or indoor place. And, of course, this technology uses all available frequency ranges for its operation.

Scottish company Sensewhere has taken another path. Considering the fact that Cell-ID technology has precision of about 300 meters and Wi-Fi location finding has around 80 meters in accuracy, they have created something new. Along with those two technologies their server pings the location of all those smartphones together and in movement, creating more precise picture (up to 5 meters) of locations of all those devices within particular building.

Tracking functions

The company called CSR created their SiRFstarV microchip that can use all available sources of location tracking data to determine indoor and outdoor location with high precision (up to 10 meters). In the similar way Broadcom developed their BCM4752 microchip that can find the location of your smartphone outdoors, indoors and even underground, discovering not only location by itself but also the floor or elevation you are currently at. The precision of their microchip is the best among all others at the market, resulting in few centimeters accuracy.

Are you happy to discover such tracking possibility? Or maybe you are scared of being constantly tracked in any of those ways? If that is true then you can prevent your smartphone from tracking you everywhere and keep your location privacy safe in that way.

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