Location Data Privacy Guidelines Released

Key questions we pose in our book include “how is location data being shared?”, “Who has access to it?”, and “Who controls the data?”  A new resource helps organizations become aware of these issues and helps them set their own strategy on information sharing.  On pages 12 and 13 of the July-August 2013 edition of ApoGeo  is a description of this resource, Location Forum’s Privacy Council’s new report, Location Data Privacy: Guidelines, Assessment & Recommendations.  These guidelines represent the first industry-created set of best practices for improving how location data is gathered, used and managed, along with a ‘scorecard’ for quantitatively measuring a company’s privacy risk level.  Our book discusses privacy implications for spatial data, which are rapidly changing for many reasons:  First, an increasing number of applications, devices, and activities in our everyday lives are becoming geo-enabled.  Second, organizations are increasingly recognizing the value of this locational information.  Third, the ability of organizations to use, and misuse, that information is becoming easier and easier.

Location Data Privacy: Guidelines, Assessment & Recommendations.

Natasha Léger, President of The Location Forum and editor of LBx Journal, explains  “These guidelines enable users and companies to understand the value of the information so that they can both take the appropriate measures to safeguard what type of data is disclosed, and determine how it is used and shared.” While location data are now seen as vital for businesses to maintain a competitive edge, the “problem with location data today is that it changes as it weaves through various hands—applications, vendors, developers, government, companies, data providers, and individual users.”  The article points out that another complication is the “diversity of legal protections across countries and states that make developing a consistent privacy policy a moving target. All this is set against a business atmosphere of continuous pressure to develop innovative location-based products and services.”

The Location Data Privacy Guidelines “bring attention to issues that many organizations and companies have chosen to ignore, due to lack of legal certainty around requirements, and provide a framework of location data practices for developers, managers, marketers, and executives.”   You can download the guidelines here.  The guidelines are not free but are the results of 8 months of interviews and extensive research, and they might be well worth the investment.

Inexpensive and crowdsourced remote sensing

In an article entitled “The Watchers”, David Samuels discusses a company seeking to deploy small satellites into orbit 500 miles (805 km) above the Earth.  This company, Skybox, founded by ex-Stanford University students, seeks to shake up the commercial space imaging industry by doing two things:  (1) Deploying smaller, less expensive satellites than what the commercial space imaging industry is currently using, the size of a dormitory room refrigerator, and (2) Using crowdsourcing for data classification.  They seek to have ordinary citizens classify the incoming data, as well as do some classification themselves, even from images that the company has collected but does not sell.  This could be the number of cars in every WalMart parking lot in the USA, the size of slag heaps outside the world’s largest gold mines in South Africa, and the rate at which the wattage along key stretches of the Ganges River is growing.  These bits of information, they reason, are clues about the economic health of countries, industries, and individual businesses.  Therefore, this information will be so valuable to investors, environmentalists, activists, and journalists, to name a few, that they will be willing to pay for the information.  The company is working with the government of Russia for a launch vehicle and hopes to launch its first satellite this month, SkySat-1.

The future: More cameras overhead?  Photograph by Joseph Kerski.

This story connects well with issues we raise in the book The GIS Guide to Public Domain Data, including data quality and resolution, military vs. civilian uses of data, crowdsourcing, and privacy. The resolution of the images returned from Skybox’s satellites will be comparable–less than 1 meter–to those from large commercial satellite imaging companies such as Digital Globe.  However, the cost of constructing them should be considerably less and the size of the satellite itself considerably smaller.  Skybox has added numerous advisers with connections in the defense industry “to avoid any military-industrial squelching of its technology before launch.”  Relying on crowdsourcing to classify images is not a new concept, but what is new here is the scale at which it could be employed, and that it is embedded in the company’s business model.  How standards will be established to assure data quality to potential purchasers of the derived information will be very interesting indeed.  Lastly, the idea of inexpensive, high resolution, easy-to-deploy satellites imaging the planet has enormous privacy implications for those of us on the ground, whether from Skybox or for others who are sure to follow.

3D imagery and aerial photography: Public access versus public safety and security

One of the recurring themes in The GIS Guide to Public Domain Data is that of open access: How and when spatial data is made publicly available. A recent report from BBC reporter Zoe Lleinman, highlighted the continuing problem of balancing the public interest in access to detailed mapping data for towns and cites versus concerns from government organisations with respect to security and public safety. Officials from Norway’s National Security Authority have refused permission for Apple to take aerial photographs of the capital city Oslo to create a 3D imagery layer that would include government buildings and restricted areas. Although the data Apple require can be sourced elsewhere (for example, from the Norwegian Mapping Authority), the authorities felt they would have no control over how data would be used if Apple were to acquire the data themselves. Other map companies have used 2D satellite imagery, which is not protected, for their mapping services.

Maintaining public safety, and national security, has long since ceased to be simply a matter of security barriers and guard dogs patrolling the perimeters of restricted areas; with increasingly easy to use web mapping services, access to detailed spatial information no longer requires a physical presence at the site. Terrorist events in Norway, and the targeting of government buildings, triggered a major debate about security and public access to such information. We discussed a similar problem with attempts to ban access to Google Earth data in India following the attacks in Mumbai in 2008. As the Norwegian and Indian authorities themselves acknowledge, there are many benefits to be gained from having access to detailed imagery, but developing effective data access policies, where information use is monitored, is an on-going challenge.

The Invasion of the Data Snatchers: Privacy Implications for the GIS Community

In a recent op-ed for the New York Times, Bill Keller lays out an interesting real scenario where a local editor legally obtains location information and proposes to publish it in the newspaper.  One of the points Bill raises is that just because we can increasingly map location information, it may be controversial to do so.  For example, when a newspaper mapped the names and addresses for 33,000 gun owners in two counties, thousands of protests came from gun owners and non-gun owners alike.  We may protest this type of mapping but we are also acquiescing to sweeping erosion of our privacy in many areas of life, prompting Bill to say, “when it comes to privacy, we are all hypocrites.”

What are the implications for the GIS community?  In our book, The GIS Guide to Public Domain Data and on the Spatial Reserves Blog, we dive into issues of privacy.  I first became aware of the dichotomy between personal information wariness and wanting to map that information while working for the US Census Bureau.  People may not relish divulging their own information for the census but appreciate  government grants to their communities stemming from census figures.  How did you feel back in the 1990s when grocery chains began offering plastic cards as a way to offer discounts?  You knew they would track your purchases, and they did!  But then consider the detailed data that you can obtain and map from consumer expenditure surveys based on that data.

Grocery Store

I think that what makes people nervous is not so much the publishing or mapping of data in aggregated form, but the fact that individual records are stored online and potentially accessible by many.  And nearly on a daily basis, we read about those records being hacked or somehow compromised.  What is the solution?  Certainly the continued improvement of cyber security.  However, beyond the technology, it is my hope that through our work in education, that we can cultivate a generation that is ethical about data and will seek to protect and secure that data.

10 Geospatial Predictions for 2013

In our book The GIS Guide to Public Domain Data, we included several items from our colleague Matt Ball, who  has been writing about spatial data for many years.  His recent 10 geospatial predictions for 2013, http://www.sensysmag.com/dialog/perspectives/28845-ten-predictions-for-2013.html, touch on several key themes in our book, including growing scrutiny on location privacy, the growth of unmanned aerial vehicles and systems, cloud computing, government cuts, an increased ability to use place and location and associated tools in documentation and reporting, and government data “decrees.”

10 geospatial predictions for 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

Which of these predictions do you think will come true?  Which have already happened and simply will gain momentum?  Which of these predictions do you believe have the most important implications for the field of GIS?

Covering Our Tracks

In our not-so-distant, non-digital past, good guys pursued bad guys with the aid of a faithful hound or trusty local guide. The trail of said bad guys could always be followed from the footprints they left or the vegetation they displaced, subtle impressions in the natural environment that lingered for a short while before they were erased by wind, rain or the occasional foraging coyote.

Nowadays, those of us who never leave home without our mobile or cell phone, leave a potentially more sinister and permanent record of our travels.

James Ball and Craig Timberg recently wrote an article for the Washington Post about the ongoing legal debate in the USA about the use of GPS data in criminal cases (GPS technology finding its way into court). In two unrelated cases, cellphone location data were used to help secure arrests, and the use of that data was sanctioned by the courts. The individuals involved did not have a “…reasonable expectation of privacy” when it came to their cell phone data and it could be collected, without a search warrant. Fearing the potential for abuse as increasingly sophisticated tracking technologies become available, legal challenges to use cell phone location data in this manner were immediately launched. The debate looks set to make it all the way to the Supreme Court.

It’s not just GPS-enabled phones that are involved. Phones without GPS devices, and their owners, can be tracked as they move between signal towers. How many phone users are aware of this and how many know who collects and has access to that information? If we knew more, would we modify our cell phone usage or would we trust the data collectors not to abuse our private location information?

Shining a torch on location privacy

A couple of weeks ago the Olympic Torch was paraded through the village where I live.  In eager anticipation of the event, a couple of elderly neighbours, keen to get the best vantage point, asked if I knew which route the torch would be taken along. Deciding that a map was probably the best way to show this, I cranked up my iPad and opened up a map viewer.  The reaction from both neighbours on seeing their respective houses and surrounds in glorious Technicolor courtesy of some recent satellite imagery went something along the lines of …. ‘Oh look there’s my house … hey wait a minute that’s an invasion of privacy, I didn’t say they could photograph it’.

Trying my best to allay their fears about any perceived intrusion, arguing that the information was being put to many good uses, which by the way included helping us find the best place to see the torch, I couldn’t help thinking their reaction was not uncommon for their generation – immediately suspicious and wary of the implications. By contrast, younger generations are growing up today in a world where having easy access to this level of detailed location information is taken for granted. Not being able to see your house on Google Street View is simply ‘pre-historic’.

Location privacy is an issue we discuss in the book. Just what rights do individuals have now with pervasive street view imagery and video surveillance cameras on almost every street corner?  In response to a number of lawsuits from disgruntled individuals and private businesses, Google have argued that “complete privacy”  no longer exists in this age of satellites and high-resolution imagery, although they have made some concessions in the form face and licence plate blurring to protect unsuspecting passers-by and residents. The technology to capture, record and manipulate location information continues to develop apace;  just what legislation will be required to govern the use of that information is still being debated and it is a discussion that will continue for years.  It’s not the data that are the problem, it’s what some people choose to do with them that’s the issue.