Press "Enter" to skip to content

Location Based Services

Location information is a valuable resource that can be put to many different uses. It can be used to keep track of your delivery, for instance. It can also secure your car by enabling you to locate it on your mobile device even when it is across the city.

What are Location-based Services?

In simplest terms, location-based services are information-based services that use your location to deliver better content and enhance your digital interaction experience. It is a useful feature for all devices and can enable you to easily find your device when it has wandered off your pockets. It is a feature that uses the GPS feature in your device to pinpoint your location and ensure you are using data to the fullest. No matter what you like to do with the information you have access to, location is a contextual feature that makes interaction with data more productive. It makes it easier to know where you were and how much you stayed.

Walking apps and health trackers also use this feature to keep you at your fittest and actively track your physical performance over time. Maps also need this feature, and many other apps will ask for this permission. As you can see, there is so much that you can do with location information, and location-based services are designed to provide you with precisely this.

Benefits of Location-Based Services

  • It makes it easier to locate lost items.
  • It keeps your information in the context it should be in at any moment.
  • It maintains the security of your information by fueling encryption and keeping hackers out.
  • Better access to the services that are close to you.

Should You Always Allow the Location Permission on Your Device?

Not necessarily. When permitting apps on your device, you are always entirely in control, and there is nothing that the data can do to you. As such, you don’t always have to accept all the permissions that your newly installed app requests. This keeps your data safe, and apps will not use your information for the wrong reasons other than the services and features these apps are supposed to provide. Even location permissions are not always a must; you can turn them off when installing new applications on your smartphone.

Even when you initially turn on the permission but realize there is no way the app is using it, you can always turn it back off in your settings. This shows the amount of control you have over your android and the much you can do with a few simple setting changes.

Useful Examples of Location-Based Services

  • Maps.
  • Location tags on photos and images.
  • Geographical-based information systems
  • Fraud detection and control.
    • Advertising.
  • Web security.
  • Fitness apps
  • Walking rewards apps
  • Distributing peace supplies to conflict-stricken regions of the world.

These are just a few usage scenarios where location information is just what you need. There are way more applications of location info than we can fit in a single blog post, and this will have to suffice for now.

Application of Location-Based Services for Startups and Small Businesses

Startups can include location-based services to their apps and web applications to make it easier to customize and personalize their experience to users, testers, and even customers. They can leverage certain aspects of location information in a manner applied to setting search results, providing machine learning-based recommendations, and accomplishing many other things.

These features can also be included in the shopping experience to provide better shopping suggestions for customers and ensure they have a better experience on your website. Data-based suggestions are useful for online shopping sites and might even prove to be precisely what your business requires.

Your mobile apps will also provide a better experience for your customers with location-based services infused into the very core of your application. This can work in the background, but the usage scenarios and areas of applications are countless.

Securing Location-Based Services

Even though location awareness is important, it does not come without many security threats. Some hackers are constantly working on new means and ways of breaking into information systems. However, this is not always the case since you can install applications to secure your device. At the same time, anyone implementing location-based services into their applications should include security features that will preserve the privacy of all its users.

Another way you can keep your location-based services ever-secure is by ensuring that you anonymize all the user details. You can still provide great services without revealing the details of any of your users. Using anonymous location tokens, for example, will make your web or mobile application more effective at delivering you the services you need and information that is accurate and relevant to what you would like to accomplish. You will also be able to provide an ever-evolving set of services and refined experiences to your customers, something they will be surely pleased with.

Encryption can also help keep the location of your users safe and whenever you ask for these apps to be built, request to have such features implemented into the applications. It makes it possible to keep all the information secure. Additionally, you can completely do away with the need for even signing into the application in the first place. This way, you will not need to deal with any identifiable information or additional security steps for your app. It will also make the app usage experience a lot easier and safer for your users and any other third parties that might be using your APIs to build more functionality.

Additionally, encryption improves your apps by preserving most privacy features and the integrity of the information in transit across the vast void of the world wide web. Thanks to it, location-based services are easier to secure, and you feel confident whenever you use an app or website. Making plans using locations and your device’s assistant can be as simple as a single voice command. You can accomplish a lot more with location-based services, and the possibilities are virtually endless.