At 11:39 P.M. on the night of December 30, 2015, about 51 kilometers below the surface of the Haro Strait between Vancouver Island and the San Juan Islands, the Juan de Fuca plate slipped. The response, in bedrooms up and down the coast of British Columbia’s mainland and island communities, was quintessentially modern: people reached for their phones. Within two minutes, the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre, maker of the LastQuake app, was already receiving eyewitness reports.
In the spring of 2019, a wild turkey escaped from an agricultural event at Calgary’s Stampede grounds. Pretty soon, sightings in the nearby neighbourhood of Ramsay, southeast of the city’s downtown core, began to show up on Facebook. A pilates instructor named Avery Maxwell set up a page called Loyal Followers of the Ramsay Turkey to keep track of his wanderings and to encourage people to give Turk — as he was soon dubbed — plenty of space and to avoid feeding him.
That’s more or less how geographers tried to map the extent of the flooding in Alberta during the summer of 2013. Moorman recalls a colleague in Canmore manually entering water levels using GPS points collected by people on mountain bikes, day after day. Moorman herself was in California, at a seminar on the latest digital mapping and geolocation tools, when the catastrophic floods struck.
The key feature that enables Google to reach into the past and peer into your future is called location history, a setting that you can toggle on and off in your Google account . If you leave it on, you can look back at the places you’ve been and the routes you’ve travelled, or zero in to figure out exactly where you were on a given day.
Urban planners aren’t the only ones turning to StreetLight and its competitors, Morzynski notes. Uber used StreetLight’s data to model where helipads should be located for its planned Uber Air service in Los Angeles; Siemens used it to model where electric vehicle charging stations should go. Retailers decide where to site new stores, developers conduct traffic studies for new buildings, and hedge funds look at customer traffic before investing in a firm.
The findings sparked another round of debates about privacy — but even Magrin, who used her phone to track her running routes, didn’t necessarily want to ditch geotracking entirely. For most people, location-sharing and privacy aren’t all-or-nothing propositions: the details of the implicit bargain matter.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.