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First designed for national defense, the system became available for public use in the 1980s. GPS: The Global Positioning System, or GPS as many of us know it, is a system of satellites operated by the U.S.How do Smartphones Track Your Movements?Īs we look at the ways you can limit location tracking on your phone, it helps to know the basics of how smartphones can track your movements.įor starters, outside of shutting down your phone completely, your phone can be used to determine your location to varying degrees of accuracy depending on the method used: If that sounds like more than you’re willing to share, know that you can do several things that can limit location tracking on your phone-and thus limit the information that can potentially end up in other people’s hands. Likewise, cell phone providers have other means of collecting location information from your phone, which they may use for advertising and other purposes as well. They may collect it, and in turn sell it to advertisers and potentially other third parties that have an interest in where you go and what you do. Yet the apps that use location tracking may do more with your location data than that.
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Location tracking on your phone offers plenty of benefits, such as with apps that can recommend a good restaurant nearby, serve up the weather report for your exact location, or connect you with singles for dating in your area. And they most certainly know a lot about where we go, thanks to the several ways they can track our location. We all know that our phones know a lot about us.
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