Location Tracking: Threat to User Privacy

How does Location Tracking Threaten User Privacy?
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How does Location Tracking Threaten User Privacy?
           Location tracking means following the movement of a subject and note the different locations along the path that the subjects take (Michael & Michael, 2011, p. 121). In modern technology, individuals can be tracked, even in real-time, through the use of online applications, devices, and other monitoring hardware. The development of location tracking technologies presented innovation in providing opportunities in monitoring movements of individuals that present's both benefits and harms to a user, especially with privacy concerns (Gruteser & Liu, 2004, p. 28). Throughout the years, privacy protection has made significant advances in developing legislation and regulations to protect personal data and other user information since many mitigating threats of different sectors use these data for cybercrime and hosting commercial and governmental exploits (Wright & Raab, 2014, p. 277). Therefore, the privacy of an individual should be protected. However, many global corporations and governments had made use of location tracking in their devices, especially in mobile phones, vehicles, and closed-circuit television (CCTV) systems to monitor the location of an individual. The most notable of which is the use of the global position system (GPS) to navigate the positioning awareness of the user but at the same time returns feedback of changes of location of the person to the GPS servers (Gruteser & Liu, 2004, p. 28). Some of the data gathered from the location tracking software are rationalized by companies as requirements to further improve the functionality of their devices, such as improving Google's Android phone location finder, improving the Wi-Fi access points, and improving bandwidth identification (Whalen, 2011, p. 61). 
Usually, the main challenge of location tracking is that more than three parties are involved in location-based technologies (Gruteser & Liu, 2004, p.28). The service provider and the user are the first two parties involve, while a third party is another entity, such as another corporation, a hacker, or even the government, that can use the information gathered by the service provider from the users (Gruteser & Liu, 2004, p.28). For instance, a car company can implement a deal with external services, such as hotel-finders, where the car service can use their built-in GPS to direct the user to the hotels that are within their network. However, a third party can have more drastic privacy breaches that can harm the user, such as cyberbullying, identity fraud, and identity theft (Bartsch & Dienlin, 2016, p. 152). Although many benefits of location-based monitoring can be acquired, such as finding the best routes and recovery of stolen gadgets, the implied consequences of location tracking can threaten the user's privacy because it exposes an individual to (1) crime exposure (tracking threat), (2) government surveillance (identification threat), and (3) surveillance capitalism (profiling threat). After these revealing the threats to location priva...