With the exception of people who travel a lot, I really don't see why location, beyond what users enter into Facebook themself, would be particular useful.
That seems to be the theme with Facebook, they collect a ton of information that isn't obviously useful. So what do Facebook know that the rest of us don't? Because the engineers at Facebook aren't stupid, they must have a reason for collecting all this stuff. Perhaps it's just in case they might find a use case some day?
> Facebook aren't stupid, they must have a reason for collecting all this stuff. Perhaps it's just in case they might find a use case some day?
The most obvious use, I would think, is to train machine learning model. Not necessarily neural networks, it could be much simpler models. Even if you don't need the data now, it can be useful to store it for later use. Maybe at some point in the future a new model will be able to see patterns that are useful. I think they operate based on the principle that data is a valuable resource, even if not immediately useful. How much data they have about their users is one of their key advantages over smaller players.
In general though, more data about you, such as locations you visit, people you're friends with, activities you do, gives them more understanding of what kind of person you are, which is undoubtedly useful when it comes to try and sell you stuff. For example, think about friends you know really well. Presumably, you have some idea of what kinds of things they would like to buy for themselves. That's because you have a good mental model of what kind of person they are and what they like, what they might be interested in.
Facebook maybe has one big advantage over Google, which is that they are a social network. They can try to influence your tastes based on the idea that you are likely to want to try things that your friends are into. They can subtly or not so subtly show you things your friends are doing with the hope that you will want to try or buy those things too.
I'm just guessing, but they should be able to infer several things by where you go during the day, such as your socioeconomic status based on the specific stores you frequent, for instance.
Not that it's a bulk of the business - but this would give google a legup for location targeted ads - I got a google ad for an autozone or similar once when I was one block from it - I am sure other data was also used to trigger that, but blinding fbook to this would mean that kind of ad dollar would be better spent with G if F didn't have that location data.
I also think there was a big push by these folks to also try to determine when you visited places to show that ads worked.. by getting your location at place X on this day and they showed an ad with 24 hours before for example.
F and G are also into people's "purchase history" / (debit card transactions, loyalty card data) for the same reason aren't I think (?)
I doubt FB is selling location to repo men like other location brokers - but that could change.
Dunno if ICE and other letter agencies buy loca data from F and G.. but like the Verizon thing about people's info is the new oil - gotta remember oil is used to create many more things than just gas. Sprint made more than a few pennies being forced to give up data, and so do others.
Certainly makes marketing dollars well spent when you can prove effectiveness and vice versa.
Id assume that people who are currently traveling are much more valuable targets: things like tour packages are something high margin and highly contextual.
Like, even if you only leave your home town once every two years, it might be worth more to facebook on that special occasion than the rest of the time.
I heard that Android strips the exif location data from images when opening them in other apps, but looking at the documentation, it might just be in the case that you use the camera intent.
I am assuming the file browsing permission bypasses any exif stripping - which maybe is why so many apps ask for it it...
On iOS 14 I have set the camera's access to Location Services as 'never'. If I inspect the EXIF on iPhone photos that I've moved to my PC the GPS fields are blank.
Facebook can solve a location from the content of the image. Listen to yourself. Even you can identify a geographic location from many images, easily.
I don't know, it's kind of a stupid idea, give Facebook an image and yet the expectation is, they're not supposed to know or understand anything about it?
Anyway, if you post an image to Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp, the EXIF data has your location, or it can be solved from the content of the image.