Imagine you’re commuting to work and your Google Maps loses signal. Suddenly, the little blue dot stops moving and you don’t know where you are. Panic ensues (for some of us).
Modern devices constantly broadcast our location through GPS, Wi-Fi, cell towers, and apps. We’re basically walking beacons of sensitive data. But here’s the flip side: While geolocation is extremely helpful, it also risks surveillance, data breaches, and misuse of location data.
In this article, we’ll explore how geospatial data works on your devices and what you can do to protect yourself.
Geospatial data is any information that tells you where something is on Earth. This can be a map, your phone’s GPS coordinates, satellite images, or even a spreadsheet that lists all the coffee shops and pet stores in your city.
Examples include:
Your location at any point is called your geolocation.
Protecting your location doesn’t mean going off the grid completely. You can take several practical steps to control who sees your data and when.
Here are five effective methods:
VPNs work like a disguise for your device, creating an encrypted tunnel to a remote server. They mask your real IP address, so websites and online services see the VPN server’s location instead of yours. If your VPN is in Croatia while you’re in the United States … it appears you’re browsing in Croatia.
A web or browser-based proxy acts like a middleman between you and the internet.
When you visit a website through a proxy, your request doesn’t go straight to that site’s server. It first passes through the proxy server. That means the website only sees the proxy’s IP address, not yours. Many proxies appear as regular HTTP links. Unlike VPNs, though, they generally lack encryption.
Your mobile phone tracks your location and collects geodata everywhere you go. One way to hide your location is to simply turn off location sensing. Turning off GPS, Wi-Fi, and cellular data—or switching to airplane mode—halts coordinate tracking (like your phone location).
On a browser, you can block the Geolocation API, which stops websites from asking for your location.
For extreme cases (we’re looking at you, journalists, security professionals, and researchers with sensitive info), you can physically isolate a device in a Faraday bag. It’s a pouch that blocks all electromagnetic signals—nothing coming in, nothing going out.
If you’ve ever used WhatsApp, a popular messaging app, you may have seen its end-to-end encryption notice. Encryption means your text gets turned into code on your phone, travels through the internet as unreadable data (even to WhatsApp’s servers), and can only be decoded by your recipient’s phone.
Another everyday example? Any website that starts with HTTPS. That little padlock icon in your address bar means your connection is encrypted and secure.
If you prefer maximum privacy, you can add hardware protections, like:
While ethics and regulatory compliance ensure that geospatial data is handled responsibly,cybersecurity remains a real threat.
The IC3 (FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center) received 880,418 complaints of internet crime in 2023. That’s about 2,412 complaints per day.
Some of these risks include:
Protecting your geospatial data comes down to small, consistent steps:
Every action limits how much of your digital trail is exposed. You don’t need to be paranoid, but taking secure measures makes it much harder for anyone to follow you.
We leave digital footprints everywhere: phone GPS logs, social media check-ins, fitness apps—even smart thermostats quietly pinging our coordinates.
Here are a few key points we covered:
Fascinated by how maps, satellites, and drones connect our world—and how to defend that data from digital invaders? Geospatial technology is a versatile and in-demand skill set, with applications spanning everything from disaster response and business intelligence to urban planning and climate research.
The University of Texas Permian Basin offers a 100% online GIS and Geospatial Graduate Certificate that can elevate your skills, expand your career options, and position you at the forefront of big data innovation.
In just 12 credits, you’ll learn to map, analyze, and protect spatial data using the latest tools—backed by UTPB’s over 20 years of GIS and geospatial industry partnerships.
Whether you’re a future data science engineer, a geospatial data engineer, or you just want to future-proof your career with a valuable credential, this program gives you the skills to stand out and stay ahead.
Best of all, you can study wherever you want, on your schedule—while shaping the future of geospatial sciences. Apply here to join the Falcon Family.
Sources:
https://www.techtarget.com/searchmobilecomputing/definition/What-is-geolocation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GV89k7c99g
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