A new national survey by the Pew Research Centre has found that 28% of US adults use mobile or social location-based services.
The survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project also found that smartphone owners, younger users, and minorities are most likely to use location services.
Over a quarter of the respondents (28%) of cell owners use phones to get directions or recommendations based on their current location, while a much smaller number (5% of cell owners) use their phones to check in to locations using geosocial services such as Foursquare or Gowalla, found the survey.
Around 12% of smartphone owners use location services on their phones. And 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, found the survey.
Pew Internet Project research specialist and co-author of the report Kathryn Zickuhr 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."
"Smartphone owners are using their phones to get fast access to location-relevant information on-the-go," Zickuhr said.
The survey also found that smartphone owners in ages 18-49 are more likely than those over 50 to use either geosocial or location-based services on their phones. And that geosocial services and automatic location-tagging are most popular with minorities, with a quarter (25%) of Latino smartphone owners using geosocial services and almost a third (31%) of Latino social media users enabling automatic location-tagging.
