Geographies of mobility: applications of location-based data

The increasing pervasiveness of mobile data – GPS tracking, mobile phones, and locative media worldwide – represents wide-scale changes in how individuals communicate and organize their movement through space. It also provides new opportunities for research and fresh challenges for society as we come to terms with these new technologies. For instance, the GPS and data trails inherent in the operation of mobile devices and user-created information such as geo-coded tweets and photos can provide new insights on population movement over space and time but also brings serious questions of privacy, particularly regarding how these data might be used by the state and businesses. Given this absolutely fundamental role of location-based data in today’s society, this special issue of IJGIS joins the larger debates about techniques, applications, and theoretical framings associated with Miller and Goodchild (Citation2014) term ‘data-driven geography.’