Many people worry about companies and governments that track their movements. Now Facebook has filed several patent applications with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for technology that uses your location data to predict your FUTURE movements and also predict when you’re going to be offline.
An article in BuzzFeed News reports:
A May 30, 2017, Facebook application titled “Offline Trajectories” describes a method to predict where you’ll go next based on your location data. The technology described in the patent would calculate a “transition probability based at least in part on previously logged location data associated with a plurality of users who were at the current location.” In other words, the technology could also use the data of other people you know, as well as that of strangers, to make predictions. If the company could predict when you are about to be in an offline area, Facebook content “may be prefetched so that the user may have access to content during the period where there is a lack of connectivity.”
Facebook doesn’t need to wait for the patents to be granted in order to start using this technology. We can assume that Facebook is already tracking people this way. Yes, Big Brother, a.k.a. Facebook, is tracking you more than ever before, despite promises by its CEO to be more careful of users’ legitimate privacy concerns.
You can read the chilling details in an article by Nicole Nguyen in Buzzfeed News at https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/facebook-location-data-prediction-patent.
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Categories: Offline Privacy & Security, Online Privacy & Security
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