Episode 45: Location Data - What Do You Mean?

Hey friends! Hope your summer is swell! It sure has been for us - perhaps a bit too good? While it's been rather tough to find time to record together, we're really pumped to finish off the summer with two new episodes. Today's chat is with Tommy's dear friend, Fernando Leiva - an analytics developer at the Centre for Advanced Computing at Queen's University. Tommy and Fernando have worked together for the past 3+ years to investigate location data-related privacy issues on smartphones. Today, we ask a simple but complicated question: location data - what do you mean?

What we see in Google Maps is vastly different than what flows behind the scenes. GPS coordinates and mailing addresses represent a mere fraction of what corporations are able to collect from our devices. A big portion of these other, discrete data are in the format of NMEA 0183 - a standard data type that is produced by hardware in our smartphones as they intercept navigation satellite signals. 

What is inside NMEA 0183? Why do companies harvest it, and for what reasons? Many questions, much confusion, and so little time! If you are privacy or data ethics nut, this episode is for you!

Tune in for Al, and more - apparently!

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