Facebook’s New Patents Will Let It Figure Out Your Next Exact Location

Dhir Acharya - Dec 12, 2018

The trio of patents that Facebook has filed will help it know where you will go next. Now, the critical question is, how will it use these technologies?

Facebook has filed for three new patents. Accordingly, Facebook may be trying to found out where you go next, when you will go offline as well as what’s the best way to bring advertisements to you.

We cannot tell for sure if Facebook’s patent proposal will turn into something real, but it does suggest that the global social network can take advantage of the amount of location data it has been collecting from you.

The first patent, filed by Facebook in May 2017, “Offline Trajectories” details description of a technology able to predict your next location, using data on your previous positions and those of other users. For example, the company can have an idea of which store you come to after work.

If the Internet connection at that store is bad, Facebook content will “prefetch” so that you can access the Internet while shopping there.

The second one, submitted in November 2017, is the “Location Prediction Using Wireless Signals on Online Social Networks.” According to this patent, Facebook will have a system that can assess the strength of the Wi-Fi connection, Bluetooth, cell phone signals, and NFC signals (near-field communication). Based on these factors, the system will then know where you are.

The key objective here is to outperform GPS (global positioning system) in figuring out your exact location, the time you visit that place, the opening hours, and the most popular time of that place. From this information, it will find out the most potential location that you may visit next.

The final one of the trio is “Predicting Locations and Movements of Users Based on Historical Locations for Users of an Online System,” which Facebook submitted in December 2015. This third patent is about targeting advertisements with the background of movement trends. The patented system pairs up locations regularly visited by users. Next, when users visit one location within a pair, the system will notice that and display advertisements or promotions from the other places in that same pair.

About these patents, Any Harrison, Facebook’s spokesman, wrote in an email that they often look out for technologies that they often file for patents for the technologies they never apply. As such, these patents will not be implemented in the future.