Have you wondered where your customers are in relations to their store? Do you want to know what they are doing at that moment? If so, Google will answer those questions for you with its Fence API (Application Programming Interface).

The concept of fences comes from geofencing, which uses a user’s location and proximity to certain locations in determining nearby businesses that the user may be interested in. A geofence is a circular area. When the user you’re tracking is in it, you can find out when they enter, exit, and stay in the fenced area. Google allows you to track a user in up to 100 fences.

Using Google’s Awareness API, which an app developer can put into your mobile app, you are able to track a local time, location down to latitude and longitude, place, activity, beacons (locations matching a name), headphones, and weather. A place is considered home, a restaurant, a store, etc. Google’s Awareness API is also able to tell you if a user was walking or biking.

While this sounds creepy from a user’s perspective, a business will find this information helpful to narrowly target a desired demographic. Creating a Google Fence, allows you to combine categories want to track. However, for weather and beacons, you will need to combine the Fence API with the Snapshot API.

For example, let’s say an umbrella business has themed umbrellas they are trying to sell. An ideal time for them to target potential customers is on a rainy day. To narrow this down, the umbrella business sees they have umbrellas decorated with musical notes and staves, so they may also look at people using headphones for a length of time because those people may be listening to music. For this umbrella company, using the weather and headphone users helped them narrow down a large audience to a much smaller group that is more likely to buy.

In some ways, it’s like the process used to get those bizarrely specific Facebook Ads we all see. It remains to be seen how app users will react once they find out that any business with the help of Google and access to Android Developer can track them at all times.