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M

ore than a quarter (28 percent) of all American adults use mobile or social location-based services of some kind. This includes anyone who takes part in one or more of the following activities:

28 percent of cell owners use phones to get directions or recommendations based on their current location.

A much smaller number (5 percent of cell owners) use their phones to check in to locations using geosocial ser-vices such as Foursquare or Gowalla. Smartphone owners are especially likely to use these services on their phones, with 12 percent doing so.

9 percent of internet users set up social media services such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn so that their loca-tion is automatically included in their posts on those services.

Taken together, 28 percent of U.S. adults do at least one of these activities either on a computer or using their mobile

phones, and many users do several of them. These figures come from a new national survey by the Pew Research Cen-ter’s Internet & American Life Project and represent project’s most expansive study of location services to date.

“Americans are not currently all that eager to share explic-itly their location on social media sites, but they are taking advantage of their phones’ geolocation capabilities in other ways,” said Kathryn Zickuhr, Pew Internet Project research specialist and co-author of the report. “Smartphone owners are using their phones to get fast access to location-relevant information on-the-go.”

Several groups have higher-than-average rates of location service usage, including smartphone owners, younger users, and non-whites. Geosocial services and automatic location tagging are most popular with minorities, continuing a trend of mobile connectivity that has been seen in other Pew Inter-net surveys.

The Growth of Mobile/Social Location-Based Services

News Briefs

Continued from page 33

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