Hi,
I have added some tags on Samsung Smart thing app and can see their location on the
my.smartthings.com portal. Now I want to share location of these devices to my portal. I have created token from my account and tried it to get location data using API. In response I am getting location ID. when I use this location ID in API then I am not getting location info, lat and long. Getting null value only.
Please help me to guide me What could be the wrong here?
Thanks,
Bipin Patel
The geolocation data isn’t populated in the SmartTag device objects in the public SmartThings API. That doesn’t mean it isn’t available but I only realised five minutes ago where it is and I need to look into it more.
this sounds like a privacy nightmare
I think so too. I actually preferred not being able to see geolocation data for the tags as it made sense.
It’s also a bit of a mess because what I can see with a PAT varies with which user is the principal of the PAT I am using, which tag I am using, seemed to be different this morning, and I suspect probably has some rate limiting thrown in too.
I haven’t done a deep dive yet, but from what I can tell, the only data being shared is a GPS location. There doesn’t appear to be any device identifier or user account tied to it. It looks like the latitude and longitude being stored simply represent where a Galaxy device happened to detect a SmartTag. Beyond that, there’s no indication of which specific device made the detection—just that it was a Galaxy device.
Returning to the original question of this thread, my concern as a tag user is that at no point have I accepted that the approximate locations of my tags may be made available outside of my Samsung account or the accounts of members of my SmartThings locations. I also haven’t agreed to API access to it outside of Samsung. So the data not being available in the public API makes sense to me.
Now clearly the location data is available. The existence of the third party uTag app demonstrates that clearly.
In theory the most I should be able to do is view the current geolocation of all the tags in my SmartThings location and the geolocation history for ‘my’ tags. Whether that is the reality is another matter. I haven’t done a methodical check yet.
Drifting even further away from the original question, I have questions over the data collection. If a tag is detected by many different devices then that’s fine. If a tag is detected multiple times in a static location by a single device then that’s fine. However what if my tag is moving with that single device and repeatedly detected? Unless the device owner explicitly states otherwise, that data really should be destroyed. Is it though?
I thought I saw unique IDs for specific devices but I haven’t checked and it doesn’t really matter anyway. If you know your tag is near to someone’s device you could track them. As stated above, this hopefully is prevented at source.
I can completely agree with everything you stated here.
You are correct. There is a UUID in there however during my shallow dive into this I compared that UUID to all UUIDs associated with my SmartThings account and none of those matched. I don’t know if they’re making a new ID for the device that found it.
A personal opinion of mine is I would personally like to be allowed to have access to the location data of tags and people associated with my account. So long as everyone agrees to have their data made available via API. If they do not agree do that then that data will never leave the server.