Why You Will Want Apple, Google To Track You

If you look at some recent and older patents from Apple, bearing in mind the current vogue for social sharing and the upcoming wave of NFC wireless credit card tech, you're going to prefer Apple and Google track your whereabouts all the time.

The future "location history database" file has very useful, innocuous purposes. Apple suggests the file could be used to geo-tag photographs taken by the iPhone's camera, presumably long after you snapped the image and forgot where it was. This could help you use the images in systems like its own iPhotos app -- which has a "places" feature -- as well as other online photo databases. Apple even mentions the history file could be useful for users to "augment a travel time-line with content," in some kind of post-vacation multimedia creation, or to form part of a "personal 'journal' which can be queried at a later time" (a Captain's Log app, anyone?). It's all about mapping and added value, suggests the text -- and though it does talk about how third party apps could call the data through an API, these too are "location aware" apps like the one's we're all signing up to in droves. The specifics of the patent also highlight the location history is approximately defined based on triangulation from known positional data like cell masts and Wi-Fi grids, because using a GPS system for permanent geo-coding would consume too much battery life. Apple functionality may deliver a type of advertising many consumers could prefer -- as it's sharply tailored to their needs, rather than irrelevant ads -- and it too requires some sort of location history. And don't tell us Google, king of social graphing and placing consumer-tailored ads on everything, everywhere, doesn't plan exactly this sort of uses for its location data from Android smartphones or tablets.