Mobile base applications are capable of providing your most sensitive information with and sometimes without your knowledge. The geolocation data can reveal a person’s physical location, and this can be done by a Global Positioning System (GPS), Internet Protocol (IP) geolocation using data bases that map IP addresses to geographic locations as well as financial transaction information. This technology has become very useful, especially in the social networking arena. It allows us to inform our friends and followers as to where we are and what we are doing. This technology created a way for us to do things once thought could only be done via telephone or desktop computer. This same technology has become a part of us and everything we do, we have grown to depend on it and it has proven to be most efficient and effective. Perhaps one of the greatest accomplishments of mobile based applications is mobile GPS, instead of doing things the traditional way by pulling directions up on our desktop and printing it out, we can now just plug the information into our mobile GPS and listen to the sound of a voice giving us step by step directions as we are driving via our mobile device from “Point A” to “Point B”. This is done via a chip installed within your mobile device, with this technology your device has a connection via the satellite to pinpoint your exact location. The efficiency of these devices does depend heavily on the signal your device is able to pull. As we all know 3G and occasionally 4G signals tend to fade out depending on availability, in the event of signal failure, the chip uses information obtained from various cell towers to triangulate your exact location. There are several reasons as to why your device may not pull a strong signal such as; inclement weather, an overcast sky, an abundance of forest or trees, and even landscaping. For some time now the issue of privacy has risen repeatedly. There is a level of security as well as professional use when utilizing such applications (social networks), therefore manufactures have made it possible for users to adjust their privacy settings therefore allowing a sense of security per your convenience.
Geolocation data is generally used for three purposes;
Geo-referencing or positioning- Ascertaining the physical location of an object or person relative to a coordinate system (map) to access specific information later.
Geo-coding- Searching for information regarding objects or services on a map, such as locating a business offering a particular type of service.
Geo-tagging- Adding geographic information to an object such as a photograph, by incorporating the geolocation data in the photograph’s metadata.
Geolocation data is generated and collected in one of two ways;
Active mode- Referred to as user device based geolocation
Passive mode- Referred to as table look up or data correlation server-based geolocation Users directed to the application instance or website that is physically closest to them mitigates the impact of speed of light limitations on application performance. The integration of accurate geolocation technology helps scale applications appropriately providing, for example, more computer resources in New York where there are millions of users, and fewer resources in Topeka, Kansas, where there might be only a few thousand users. Cloud balancing is the routing of application requests across applications or workloads that resides in multiple clouds. It assumes that all instances of the application deployed in the various clouds are accessible at all times. A large part of the value proposition of cloud balancing is to optimize resource utilization while simultaneously enhancing user performance. Geolocation data advances this process by supplying information about the user connection that can be valuable to a global server load balancing solution that is attempting to find
