Location Data Explained
What is Location Data?
Location data is one of the next big things emerging in the world. Currently, we can think of location data as our cellphone’s GPS, helping us track where we’re driving, how many steps we’re taking per day, and where that rare Pokémon is hiding.
But in the near future, it will do a tremendous amount of different things. Imagine only using the internet to check your email and nothing else, and that’s where we are today in the world of location data usage.
Why is Location Data important?
Suppose you’re delivering a shipment of gold bars to a bank. Each gold bar is worth around $500,000 USD. Would tracking the armored car be enough for your peace of mind? What if you could slap a sticker on each gold bar, which connected itself to a wireless network, and was powered by UV light? That’d be a much better way to know where the wealth is when in transit, right? Especially if it goes missing.
“Yea, but as soon as the gold bar is taken outside the wireless network range, it disappears!”
The innovators of location data have thought of that. The solution? A worldwide wireless mesh network. That’s right, every inch of the planet, supporting a low-powered wireless network, for small bandwidth Internet of Things (IoT) devices. It likely will not allow you to stream Netflix in HD on top of Mount Kilimanjaro, but it could let the basecamp track your heart monitor, altitude, and blood sugar levels during your climb.
This type of data is not so much intended for humans, as it is for the things we use. Autonomous vehicles will be a regular part of daily life (in the parts of the world that choose to adopt it). Those devices will create and consume unfathomable bits of data, and require sensors all over the place - streets, parking lots, car washes, restaurants (automated Uber-Eats delivery is a real thing). All of these things have to talk to each other in real-time. It sounds like Star Trek, but it is being built right now.
Speaking of food, sensor data can be used to track supply chains from farms and mills, to see exactly where your food is coming from, and what your country is importing and exporting. Instead of a tag on your clothes, telling you where it was made, it will have a QR code that you can scan with your phone to see the actual building where it was manufactured on Google Earth.
Every gun manufactured could have sensors in it, that automatically trigger a police response if it passes through the border of a place no gun should ever be - a school, movie theater, mall, or stadium.
How is Location Data collected?
Sensors the size and thickness of a sticker, powered by solar or wireless electric devices (like the newest cell phones) are placed everywhere. They’re built into devices and tracked via a smartphone app. Wouldn’t it be nice to never lose your remote again? It would send your phone a message letting you know the coordinates, which your phone would figure out and translate - to being lost under the couch. Just about every type of smart device being engineered today includes sensors for data collection.
This data is then sent to a network over a wireless connection. This network will need to be highly customized and ready to support this type of data, which are constant small streams that need to be broadcast in real-time. Even a split-second delay could be hazardous. In order to do that, many blockchain startups are creating their own specialized hardware, nicknamed “Skyminers”, “Sentinels”, and “Gateways” by their respective manufacturers. From there, this data will need to be sent into a much larger collection of network nodes that can analyze the data, make predictions, provide statistics, detect errors and self-correct them. Projects that are innovating in Smart-Data Fabric and DAG Tangle technology will be the network layer that handles this “supervisory” role.
Who will collect Location Data? It remains to be seen who the dominant network provider will be in the location data race. It is still very much in its infancy, with innovation coming from individuals and small startups. Expect giants like Verizon, Comcast, and Google to enter the playing field at some point by either buying out or just financially backing some of these companies. The government will need to be involved (or a governing body of some sort) to define standards for the sensor hardware, networks, and data analysis to ensure personal privacy, while simultaneously ensuring transparency of the raw data itself. There are many projects currently attempting to be this standardizing rule maker, but there are still a lot of people yet to arrive at the party. This is a trillion dollar industry barely in its sunrise.