Depending on your use case, you have a number of options when it comes to controlling when, where and how data collection operates.

First question, are you doing indoor positioning (IPS), outdoor positioning (GPS) or both?

Indoors

If you require indoor positioning you will need Bluetooth beacons in your building/venue. A good place to start is to check out our quick guide to using beacons for indoor positioning.

If your app only uses indoor positioning, then you don't need to enable GPS or define any GPS activation locations. 

You can still set up activation schedules. These are simply the time periods when our SDK will be switched on in your app. Outside of these defined time windows, the SDK is switched off and no data is collected. If no activation schedules are created, by default positioning will be always on (but still limited to the installed beacon footprint).

That's OK if your app only uses location in the foreground, e.g. for blue-dot navigation. Then you can ignore activation schedules, and leave the SDK active all the time. 

Outdoors

Here we use the GPS chip on the smartphone to provide positioning. 

GPS activation locations must be defined for any GPS positioning. Without an activation location, no GPS data will be generated. This applies to navigation while the app is in the foreground, as well as background data collection (i.e. when the app is not being used).

And we'd also recommend setting up activation schedules, particularly for a one-off event, or for a venue that only hosts events on certain days, so that background data collection can be switched on and off at certain times.

Again, if your app only uses location in the foreground, e.g. for blue dot navigation, then you can ignore activation schedules, and leave the SDK active all the time. But this is a less frequent use case outdoors.