Facebook Wants To Calculate Your Future Location

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Facebook has filed a patent for a tool that would use your historical location data to predict where you will go next.

Location-based marketing has already proven to be a highly effective way to reach out to customers at the right time and in locations where they are most likely to perform an action. However, in a mobile-first and fast paced world, targeting based on location only offers a small-window of opportunity.

Now Facebook is keen to try and predict your future location, hence rendering location-based targeting even more powerful than it is today. The company has filled a series of patent applications with the US Patent and Trademark Office for technology that uses your historic location data to predict where you will be going next.

Facebook has filled a series of patent applications for technology that uses your historic location data to predict where you will be going next.

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While filing a patent does not necessarily mean the technology would ever be implemented, this certainly seems like the type of tools Facebook would relish for.

The application, titled “Offline Trajectories” describes a method to predict your future location based on where you have been before, a.k.a. a “transition probability based at least in part on previously logged location data associated with a plurality of users who were at the current location.”

That sounds like Facebook would also use the data of other people you are connected with to refine its predictions.

No need to plan your night out anymore, Facebook will tell you where to go.

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A graph from the “Offline Trajectories” patent showing how the Facebook-developed technology would calculate the probability that a user will be offline based on geographic location prediction. If offline time is predicted, the app would preload News Feed content.