A study conducted by Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project says 28 percent of U.S. adults consume mobile and location-based services. At least one of these activities (below) were done either on a computer or using mobile phones, with many users doing several of them. The following activities include:
- 28% of cell owners use phones to get directions or recommendations based on their current location—that works out to 23% of all adults.
- A much smaller number (5% of cell owners, equaling 4% of all adults) use their phones to check in to locations using geosocial services such as Foursquare or Gowalla. Smartphone owners are especially likely to use these services on their phones.
- 9% of internet users set up social media services such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn so that their location is automatically included in their posts on those services. That works out to 7% of all adults.
These results are based on a national telephone survey of 2,277 adults conducted April 26-May 22, 2011. The survey included 1,522 interviews conducted by landline phone, and 755 interviews were conducted by cell phone. This may be a small sample size of people interviewed, but it is still substantial findings nonetheless.
Discussing the figures obtained in the survey, Kathryn Zickuhr, Pew Internet Project research specialist and co-author of the report said “Americans are not currently all that eager to share explicitly their location on social media sites, but they are taking advantage of their phones’ geolocation capabilities in other ways,” she added “Smartphone owners are using their phones to get fast access to location-relevant information on-the-go.”
I agree with her, but this shouldn’t seem like much of a surprise to most people considering the rapid growth of smartphones in the U.S. The study shows how hypercritical people are when it comes to unwillingness to share their location, at the same time using their phones geo-location capabilities with apps like Gowalla, Foursquare, and Google+.
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