Pew: 28 percent of adults use location-based services

{mosads}Another 7 percent have configured their Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn accounts to automatically include their location on posts. That amounts to just 14 percent of social media users, indicating that the overwhelming majority of users still prefer some degree of control over their location data.

“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,” said Pew research specialist and report co-author Kathryn Zickuhr. “Smartphone owners are using their phones to get fast access to location-relevant information on-the-go.”

Unsurprisingly, younger users were more likely to use location-based services. Hispanics were by far the most likely to use geosocial check-in services and to automatically tag their location. However, they were the least likely to user their phones to get location-based information.