[5] LBS can also include mobile commerce when taking the form of coupons or advertising directed at customers based on their current location.
LBS is critical to many businesses as well as government organizations to drive real insight from data tied to a specific location where activities take place.
Modern location-based services are made possible by technological developments such as the World Wide Web, satellite navigation systems, and the widespread use of mobile phones.
The Global Positioning System was first developed by the United States Department of Defense in the 1970s, and was made available for worldwide use and use by civilians in the 1980s.
[15] Research forerunners of today's location-based services include the infrared Active Badge system[16] (1989–1993), the Ericsson-Europolitan GSM LBS trial by Jörgen Johansson (1995), and the master thesis written by Nokia employee Timo Rantalainen in 1995.
In 1996 the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued rules requiring all US mobile operators to locate emergency callers.
As a result of these efforts in 1999 the first digital location-based service patent was filed in the US and ultimately issued after nine office actions in March 2002.
In 2000, after approval from the world’s twelve largest telecom operators, Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia jointly formed and launched the Location Interoperability Forum Ltd (LIF).
This forum first specified the Mobile Location Protocol (MLP), an interface between the telecom network and an LBS application running on a server in the Internet domain.
Then, much driven by the Vodafone group, LIF went on to specify the Location Enabling Server (LES), a "middleware", which simplifies the integration of multiple LBS with an operators infrastructure.
Based upon the device location, it was capable of providing detailed bearing, distance and communication information to the vessel operator in real time, in addition to the marine assistance and MAYDAY features.
[22][23] The first LBS services were launched during 2001 by TeliaSonera in Sweden (FriendFinder, yellow pages, houseposition, emergency call location etc.)
There are various companies that sell access to an individual's location history and this is estimated to be a $12 billion industry composed of collectors, aggregators and marketplaces.
An analysis, conducted by the non-profit newsroom called The Markup, found six out of 47 companies who claimed over a billion devices in their database.
[9] In the UK, networks do not use trilateration; Because LBS services use a single base station, with a "radius" of inaccuracy, to determine a phone's location.
In order to provide a successful LBS technology the following factors must be met: Several categories of methods can be used to find the location of the subscriber.
This application allows a person to access information based on their surroundings; especially suitable for using inside closed premises, restricted or regional area.
Another alternative is an operator- and satellite-independent location service based on access into the deep level telecoms network (SS7).
This solution enables accurate and quick determination of geographical coordinates of mobile phones by providing operator-independent location data and works also for handsets that do not have satellite navigation capability.
GPS and GSM do not work very well indoors, so other techniques are used, including co-pilot beacon for CDMA networks, Bluetooth, UWB, RFID and Wi-Fi.
According to the independent wireless analyst firm Berg Insight the attach rate for GPS is growing rapidly in GSM/WCDMA handsets, from less than 8% in 2008 to 15% in 2009.
In the US companies such as Rave Wireless in New York are using GPS and triangulation to enable college students to notify campus police when they are in trouble.
The Singaporean mobile operator MobileOne carried out such an initiative in 2007 that involved many local marketers, what was reported to be a huge success in terms of subscriber acceptance.
The bill which was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee, would also require mobile services to disclose the names of the advertising networks or other third parties with which they share consumers' locations.
Indeed, a 2013 MIT study[41][42] by de Montjoye et al. showed that 4 spatio-temporal points, approximate places and times, are enough to uniquely identify 95% of 1.5M people in a mobility database.
Recent research has shown that crowdsourcing is also an effective approach at locating lost objects while still upholding the privacy of users.