IP Geolocation Privacy: The Comprehensive Guide (2024)

Corporations now use powerful artificial intelligence tools and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to mine growing volumes of data, correlate data points, identify trends, and finetune their business. IP geolocation data has become a top data point because it connects people and objects to events and tasks. However, not every person feels comfortable with corporations electronically monitoring their every move. Consequently, the industry is trying to form IP Geolocation user privacy policies that satisfy both businesses and individuals, a very difficult undertaking.

An Introduction to IP Geolocation and Privacy Concerns

Nowadays, every enterprise, no matter what the industry, is in the data analytics business. Recent technology advances, such as cloud, AI, the Internet of Things, and APIs, provide them with treasure chests of information about how they, their partners, and their customers function. Finding novel ways to leverage that information has become the key to business success or failure.

However, the idea of personal property has become amorphous in today’s virtual world. IP geolocation information leverages communications networks and special-purpose solutions, like Global Positioning Systems, to identify people or objects as they move from place to place. A company relies on IP Geolocation information to deliver a service, like tracking how much walking a person did during the day, to a client. What happened during that transaction becomes valuable to businesses. But who controls the information, either the consumer or the business is not as clear. Consequently, the potential privacy risks concerning IP Geolocation technology have been gaining more attention.

IP Geolocation Technology Has Tremendous Value

IP Geolocation data has become a key data analytics building block. Why? Simply, it has incredible power and flexibility. A piece of the data point is valuable but only as a starting point and not an endpoint. Corporations have to correlate it with other information for it to become useful. Location data provides suppliers with a wide and ever-growing array of uses because of its richness. This information, whether it is about a person or an object, illustrates where a person or item’s physical location is now, often where they came from, where they are going, and what they do as they move.

Such insights enrich daily interactions: “83% of consumers now expect personalized experiences from brands, and companies that don’t take advantage of the geographical location data at their disposal are missing out on one of the best opportunities to provide their audience with the sorts of relevant and valuable experiences that support real, long-term customer loyalty.”

The availability of real-time IP Geolocation information helps businesses as well as consumers in many ways. APIs enable such transactions. They connect the movement information to a wide and growing array of other applications.

Location-based marketing and sales
Food delivery
Personal fitness tracking
Commercial fleet management
Urban planning
Consumer navigation
Healthcare delivery becomes possible.

For businesses, IP geolocation leads to cost savings, increases in operational efficiency, enhanced customer service, and new opportunities. Much of the information is available in real time, so adjustments can be made. A logistics company knows if its truck is on schedule. A consumer understands exactly when their package will arrive. As a result, a bevy of entrepreneurs are trying to find the next revolutionary use of the technology and transform their start-ups into the next Google.

How comfortable would you be with your every movement tracked? Many are uncomfortable with the idea. As evidence, most (68%) of consumers are concerned about their online privacy. So, discussions are taking place, laws are being enacted, and best practices are being developed to satisfy both consumers and businesses.

How IP Geolocation Data Collection Occurs

The growing variety of mobile, intelligent smart devices makes it possible for corporations to track various types of movements across the globe. At the endpoint, smartphones, Internet of Things sensors, laptops, and desktops have the intelligence and processing power needed to identify when the device is turned on and send out signals as it goes from place to place. Using APIs, various networks, IP addresses, Global Positioning Satellite (GPS), Wi-Fi networks, cellular services, and enterprise networks, supported by routers and switches, collect the endpoint information and send it to central servers that accumulate the movement specifics.

Such real-time exact location information is helpful in many ways. As a result, hardware devices and business and consumer applications are being designed to take advantage of IP Geolocation information. Just about every cell phone and other personal device as well as popular social media applications, like Facebook, Tik-Tok, and Twitter, collect and leverage location data in numerous ways.

The Role of User Consent in IP Geolocation Data Collection

With an application, an individual signs an agreement to make the user’s location information trackable in return for a desired user experience, like having food delivered to their home. The app relies on tracking technologies, like GPS, to determine the person’s place and movement. The initial transaction is simple.

As noted, there is tremendous value in data collection, consolidating it, and trying to identify different patterns. Therefore, a growing number of companies try to exploit the information. So, what happens to the IP Geolocation information after the initial transaction becomes quite complicated. Carriers and technology companies have been selling their location data to third-party aggregators who use it in various ways. What the third-party company does with the information and what data security checks it uses are now open questions.

Theoretically, data protection steps have to be put into place. How? Before the transaction, any personal data is supposed to be anonymized: in essence, all identifying traits are stripped out. However, tension has been rising between user privacy advocates and businesses about how to interpret that mandate.

IP Geolocation Data Spawns a Multi-Billion Market

Location information is quite valuable because humans often act consistently. This secondary market uses IP Geolocation data to understand and predict individual movements. Tracking common movements enables companies to accurately guess what someone will do next once they act, like entering a website.

Companies constantly try to predict customer behavior, so, the secondary location data market collects location data and builds collective profiles. Users are not identified by name but by common characteristics, starting with location and often including age, gender, travel frequency, travel pattern, and even income level. Companies then group them into personas, like an active 50-year-old female interested in hiking, allowing advertisers to target potential customers more granularly.

Location data analytics spawned a massive industry, generating $26.22 billion in 2024 and is expected to reach $95.66 billion in 2030. The third parties analyze the data and cater to advertisers, retail outlets, and even hedge funds seeking insights into consumer behavior. It’s a very hot, dynamic, and competitive market.

Unethical Uses of IP Geolocation Data

But how the information is used can be unsettling. In some cases, cybercriminals provide unauthorized access to IP Geolocation information, and data security is compromised. These third parties have nefarious purposes. IP Geolocation data can be paired with personal information, like a person’s real-time location, residential address, workplace, and frequently visited spots. Once such connections are made, individuals may fall victim to wrongdoing, like stalking, harassing, cyberbullying, identity theft, and domestic violence.

Also, how aware individuals are that their IP Geolocation is used for anything other than their immediate application is unclear. The consent agreements are often long and something users check off but rarely read closely. The wording is legalese and often confusing and difficult to understand. As a result, such data aggregation is often seen as a violation of individuals’ right to privacy.

Adding to user privacy’s complexity, it has become very challenging to keep pace with rapid developments in tracking data aggregation technologies. The volume of data collected, consolidated, sliced, and diced is rapidly rising, the AI algorithms become more sophisticated, new use cases arise, and the results become more varied.

Ethical Implications of Geolocation Data Collection

So, it is not surprising that ethical concerns have been raised about how IP Geolocation user data is collected and used. The area is much like email Opt-Ins in terms of a lack of transparency. Vendors sometimes follow the letter of any laws (which are few) and theoretically enable their customers to opt out but how easy the process is widely vary. In some cases, users have to go through multiple confusing steps, and processes that seem to be designed to discourage them from opting out. Therefore in several cases, vendors put their self-interests ahead of what is best for the customer. As a result, what users sign up for is not always transparent.

In addition, location data is very challenging to fully anonymize. Even when companies take out personalized data, the anonymized location data still reveals select traits. After all, finding patterns in information is why companies design AI algorithms. So, highly aggregated data illustrates patterns of what groups of people do. “In 2017, an interactive “Global Heat Map” of movements of users of the Strava fitness app inadvertently revealed the locations of deployed military personnel at classified locations.”

The widespread availability of location tracking technologies and the fast and healthy market growth encourage vendors to act first and navigate the area’s user privacy complexities later. As tracking technologies become further developed and more widely accessible and data analytics become more sophisticated, anonymous data points (particularly when tracked over time) can be used to facilitate identification of the individual in more cases.

In sum, the line between who owns such information and what third parties can and cannot do with it is quite blurry right now. Compounding the challenge, third parties acquire and use information and have no direct relationship with the person being tracked. Therefore, they could take the anonymized IP Geolocation data and combine it with identified personal data. While such actions may seem like unethical practices, US law prevents it only in a few select instances.

Government Establishes Privacy Regulations

As noted, individuals sometimes do not know what happens with their personal location data. Typically, they consent to have it used for one action that benefits them, such as getting directions to a destination but have not approved the myriad of other possible uses that third parties find for such information. Consequently, the use can be an infringement on their right to privacy and raises concerns about the ethical use of IP geolocation data.

In response, the government has become involved in regulating the industry. New laws have been introduced that impact how vendors collect, use, protect, and share personal location information. The laws’ scope and constraints differ by country and region. Here are a couple at the forefront of establishing guidelines in this emerging area.

The US federal government has done little in the area of privacy legislation. In 2017, the Federal Communications Commission issued an order providing that data included in the National Emergency Address Database, which is collected using Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to locate 9-1-1 callers within a building, may not be used for any other purpose. Otherwise, how the information is used is up to the suppliers.

Theoretically, if third parties were acting improperly, the government could enforce section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which prohibits deceptive and unfair trade practices. However, such steps are complex, time-consuming, and expensive.

General Data Protection Regulation Outlines Privacy Guidelines

One of the first data privacy regulations is the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Its goal was to enable individuals to gain greater control over how businesses use their personal information. The regulation outlines standards concerning how companies obtain user consent and put data privacy protection mechanisms in place. Users gain more power and can even opt to have themselves forgotten. If the rules are not followed, enterprises risk fines and reputational damage.

California Enacts Privacy Regulations

California is at the forefront of enacting data privacy legislation in the US. Its Consumer Privacy Act grants state residents the right to know what personal data is collected, the ability to opt out of the sale of their information, and the right to delete their information.

What is Next for How Companies Handle IP Geolocation Data?

New policies, intense debate, and uncertainty are expected to continue as this area evolves. So, what steps can technology companies take to assuage consumers’ privacy concerns protect themselves from future litigation, and build up trust with their customers?

Enterprises could establish group privacy policies. They would outline what third-party aggregators can do with IP Geolocation data once they consolidate it. Guardrails could be put into place that make it less likely that individual behaviors are gleaned as data is correlated.

User awareness campaigns may help consumers understand IP Geolocation privacy’s many repercussions. The government could force technology vendors to invest in user education. This step was taken with cigarette suppliers who pay for advertising outlining tobacco’s potential health problems.

Another option is adopting revenue-sharing models. Here if a company sells data to a third party, then its customers are compensated in some way. In that way, the consumer as well as the business benefits from third-party data use.

IP Geolocation data has been riding the recent technology wave and becoming more prevalent and more important to businesses and their customers. How that information is used, especially by third parties, has become a controversial area. Laws and best practices are emerging to clarify what is permissible and what is not, but the area is expected to remain murky in the near term.

FAQs

What can now be done with IP Geolocation data?

Consumers do allow themselves to be tracked in return for a service, like mapping and directions. What happens with that information after it has been collected and used for the initial application is unclear.

What laws are in place to protect consumer information?

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and California’s Consumer Privacy Act provide consumers with some control over how their personal location data is used.