-: In this lesson, we're going to talk about location services,
which allows your mobile device to understand where it is
on the planet.
There are three basic types of location services
you're going to find on most mobile devices.
The first one is what we call coarse positioning.
The second is known as GPS,
or the Global Positioning System.
And the third is known as IPS,
or the indoor positioning system.
Now, the first location services we need to discuss
is coarse positioning.
This is the oldest method of using positioning
using mobile phones.
And before there was GPS receivers built into your handset,
we still had coarse positioning.
Now, coarse positioning is called this
because it has a rough guess of where you are.
And it does this based on triangulating your location
from your device to three or more cellular towers.
When you're connecting to your cellular towers,
your service provider does have a good idea
of where you are.
Now, this isn't the most accurate way to get your location,
but it is a good way to have a rough idea of where you are.
Generally, this will be able to figure out
where you are within a couple of city blocks.
The second type of location services we have
is more accurate, and this is known as GPS,
or the Global Positioning System.
The Global Positioning System is a space-based
radio navigation system consisting of a constellation
of satellites and a network of ground stations
that's used for monitoring and control purposes.
Currently, there are about 32 GPS satellites
that are orbiting the earth
at an altitude of about 11,000 miles above the surface
of the earth, which places this into a medium Earth orbit.
This GPS constellation provides users
with accurate information on their position,
speed, and time, anywhere in the world
and in all weather conditions.
To be able to access the data from the GPS satellites,
all you need is a GPS receiver, and most smartphones
and mobile devices these days have a GPS receiver built in.
The signal coming from space is extremely weak, though.
It's only 150 aW, which stands for attowats.
This is 150 times 10 to the -18th watts of power.
That's pretty amazing when you think about it.
This signal is coming all the way from 11,000 miles away
in space at such a low level.
And our mobile devices can still pick it up
and figure out where we are in the world.
In order to use GPS for location services,
your device must have GPS enabled,
which is done under your settings,
under the Location or Privacy tab,
depending on your mobile device.
In our mobile devices, GPS can be used to track our location
for lots of different purposes.
Some of them are great,
and some of them are kind of a violation of your privacy.
For example, we can use GPS to locate our position
on Earth and use a mapping program to be able
to provide us directions to the local restaurant
that we're trying to go to.
But on the other hand,
if you don't have your privacy settings set correctly,
your GPS location can also be used by applications
to determine where you're located,
what your shopping habits are,
and other details of your daily life.
So it's important to understand
that this capability exists on your smartphone.
And then, based on your privacy preferences,
you can determine if you want to enable it or disable it
or give access to location services for certain programs
and not for others.
The third type of location services we have is known as IPS.
And IPS is the indoor positioning system.
Now, the indoor positioning system allows your device
to be used indoors and still be able
to figure out where you are.
You see, the problem with GPS is,
if I'm inside of a building, it's really hard for it
to get an accurate reading for me
because I don't have a clear line of sight to the sky,
where the satellites are located.
But with the indoor positioning system,
your device can triangulate its own location
by basing its proximity to other radio sources
like cellular radio towers, Wi-Fi access points,
or even Bluetooth or RFID beacons located inside the area.
For example, if you go to a modern shopping mall,
they have a lot of RFID and Bluetooth beacons set up
throughout that mall.
This way, your device can know where it is
exactly inside the mall.
And as you're approaching the pretzel stand,
all of a sudden you get a notification, $1 off pretzels.
How do they do that?
They figured it out based on your IPS,
your indoor positioning system location.
So if you're worried about this from a privacy aspect,
you need to make sure you go into your settings,
and you change your location services
to not allow that indoor positioning system to work.
And that will turn off the ability to locate you
using Bluetooth or RFID beacons,
because that is the primary way they get
very exact information about where you are
inside of a building.
So now that we've talked about the three types
of location services, I think it's important
for us to discuss geo-tracking.
Now, geo-tracking is the tracking of your location
over a given amount of time based on where you are.
And it can do this using any of the three methods
we just discussed.
If you disable your GPS receiver,
you're going to block geo-tracking from occurring using GPS,
but you also need to make sure you turn it off
for IPS as well.
And even if you don't have a GPS receiver
inside of your mobile device,
your device can still know where it is roughly,
based on the location of the different wireless networks
that you connect to along the way.
For example, if you went to your local coffee shop
and logged in there, that's a location.
And then if you go to a restaurant later on
and you log in there, that's another location.
And these locations can start being added up
to give us an idea or a pattern of life
of where you've been.
Now, in addition to that, almost all smartphones
and tablets also include a camera now.
By default, your mobile device's camera embeds the location
of where you took that photo into the details of that image.
Using these images that you post online,
people can then figure out exactly where and when you were
by looking at the GPS coordinates inside of those photos,
which is called geotagging.
Again, privacy concerns are abound here.
And if you're worried about this,
you need to make sure you go into the settings
for the camera app on your smartphone
and turn off the ability for it to store your GPS location
with your photos.
The final thing to mention
when it comes to location services
is sometimes you can't turn them off completely.
And the reason for this is your organization
may be using location as one of your authentication factors.
For example, I travel quite a bit.
And when I try to log into my email,
I either get a warning or sometimes I'm blocked completely
because our system sees that I'm logging in
from multiple locations at different places
around the world.
This can sometimes throw off your system.
And it goes, "Hey, are you really Jason?
Are you really Jason on travel?
Or is somebody trying to hack into your account?"
For this reason, a lot of organizations tighten down
their security by using location as an additional factor,
as part of the authentication process,
to ensure that their people are logging in
from places they are authorized to log in from.
So remember, your mobile phones have three different types
of location services on them.
There is a coarse position that is calculated
based on a triangulation of your device
to your three closest cellular towers.
There is GPS that gives you an accurate position
coming from three or more satellites in the sky.
And there is IPS, or the indoor positioning system,
that is going to be using Bluetooth, RFID,
wireless networks, and cellular towers
to try to accurately pinpoint where you are
inside a given building.