Issues in the Development of Location Privacy Theory

ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter, 2011

The rapid advance in handheld communication devices and the appearance of smartphones has allowed users to connect to the Internet and surf on the WWW while they are moving around the city or traveling. Location based services have been developed to deliver content that is adjusted to the current user location. Social networks have also responded to the challenge of users who can access the Internet from any place in the city, and location based social-networks like Foursquare have become very popular in a short period of time. The popularity of these applications is linked to the significant advantages they offer: users can exploit live location-based information to take dynamic decisions on issues like transportation, identification of places of interest or even on the opportunity to meet a friend or an associate in nearby locations. A side effect of sharing location-based information is that it exposes the user to substantial privacy related threats. Revealing the user's loca...

2010

Due to the ability of cell phone providers to use cell phone towers to pinpoint users' locations, federal E911 requirements, the increasing popularity of GPS-capabilities in cellular phones, and the rise of cellular phones for Internet use, a plethora of new applications have been developed that share users' real-time location information online . This paper evaluates users' risk and benefit perceptions related to the use of these technologies and the privacy controls of existing location-sharing applications. We conducted an online survey of American Internet users (n = 587) to evaluate users' perceptions of the likelihood of several location-sharing use scenarios along with the magnitude of the benefit or harm of each scenario (e.g. being stalked or finding people in an emergency). We find that although the majority of our respondents had heard of location-sharing technologies (72.4%), they do not yet understand the potential value of these applications, and they have concerns about sharing their location information online. Most importantly, participants are extremely concerned about controlling who has access to their location. Generally, respondents feel the risks of using location-sharing technologies outweigh the benefits. Respondents felt that the most likely harms would stem from revealing the location of their home to others or being stalked. People felt the strongest benefit were being able to find people in an emergency and being able to track their children. We then analyzed existing commercial location-sharing applications' privacy controls (n = 89). We find that while location-sharing applications do not offer their users a diverse set of rules to control the disclosure of their location, they offer a modicum of privacy.

Australian Journal of Telecommunications and the Digital Economy, 2018

This article reviews existing knowledge regarding the powers of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and the Australian Federal Police to access and use metadata. The review is primarily based on published research on the privacy impact of the revised metadata retention and collection framework introduced in 2015. The review reveals that, after 2015, no comprehensive study was undertaken in the following areas: how location information is generated and exchanged in the IP-mediated long-term evolution telecommunications network, and how mobile devices are tracked and create more precise location estimates, in the legal and policy context of the exceptions and privacy safeguards introduced after 2015; the discretionary powers of the agencies to use personal and sensitive information to identify inquiries and investigations to pursue, to enforce the law and perform their functions, and to carry out activities related to their functions and purposes; and the flexible oversi...

Location Based Services (LBS) is one of the emerging technologies in the mobile, networking and information services. LBS, the branch of computer program-level services used in various fields and support, the application are broadly classified as Maps and Navigation, Information service, Tracking service, Games, Social networking, Vehicular navigation and Advertising. Location is mainly determined into two levels such as internally by a device or externally by systems and kind of networks with which the device interrelates. The advanced mobile networking and communication lend a hand to the civilization with various location based mobile application but while concerning about location privacy, there is most prominent question from the society, how about my location privacy? This article reviews a selected level of privacy in location based services that have been published in the different research journal. The review throws light on the threat and remedy on location privacy in the location based application and services that are represented.

2006

Location-based services (LBS) rely on knowledge of a user's location to provide tailored services or information by means of a wireless device. LBS applications have wide-ranging implications for society, particularly in the context of tracking and monitoring groups of individuals such as children, invalids, and parolees. Despite a great deal of attention paid to technical and commercial aspects of LBS technologies, consideration of the legal, ethical, social and technology momentum issues involved has been wanting. This paper examines some of the more pressing issues that are expected to arise from the widespread use of LBS. The outcome of this paper is the development of an LBS privacy-security dichotomy. The dichotomy demonstrates the importance of striking a balance between the privacy of the individual and national security as a whole. It also presents a realized framework for reasoning about potentially problematic issues in LBS applications.

Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2005

Location-based services (LBS) are services that take into account the geographic location of a user [1]. With the rapid growth of mobile devices, LBS are expected to spread rapidly. While LBS promise efficiency and effectiveness gains, their use also raises fundamental privacy issues. In a market survey, 24% of the respondents mentioned that they are seriously concerned about the privacy implications of disclosing their location [2]. Thus the focus of this paper is to understand what antecedents determine intentions to use LBS. A research model is developed that incorporates constructs, such as personality traits [3, 4], task and technology characteristics [5, 6], perceived privacy, trust and risk [7-9], and usefulness [10] as antecedents of LBS usage intentions.

2004

Abstract Location awareness, the ability to determine geographical position, is an emerging technology with both significant benefits and important privacy implications for users of mobile devices such as cell phones and PDAs. Location is determined either internally by a device or externally by systems and networks with which the device interacts, and the resultant location information may be stored, used, and disclosed under various conditions that are described.

Foundations and Trends® in Privacy and Security, 2017

With rapid growth in technology and cost reduction of hardware and storage media, huge amount of data can be acquired and stored. Acquisition and storage of information results in the increase of huge databases. Such databases exceeded the ability of an i ndividual to completely understand and use. The process to analyze such information is more severe in geo - spatial information. In order to analyze and utilize such data repositories to fullest, a few techniques like data mining, expert system, database man agement system, spatial data analysis, machine learning and artificial intelligence etc. have been tried. Nowadays, spatial data mining (SDM) is a well identified domain of data mining. It can be defined as the discovery of interesting, implicit and previo usly unknown knowledge from large spatial data bases .Generally in spatial database the main concern of an individual is with disclosure of their information about personal location history records. An intruder or unauthorized person can acquire informat ion such as frequent locations visits about a particular person by submitting queries by statistical or pattern mining and deriving the required results from extracted records. In this paper, techniques are suggested to protect the location privacy of an individual depending on level of protection they must be provided .

Proc. Interact, 2003

Context -aware computing often involves tracking peoples' location. Many studies and applications highlight the importance of keeping people's location information private. We discuss two types of locationbased services; location-tracking services that are based on other parties tracking the user's location and position-aware services that rely on the device's knowledge of its own location. We present an experimental case study that examines people's concern for location privacy and compare this to the use of location-based services. We find that even though the perceived usefulness of the two different types of services is the same, locationtracking services generate more concern for privacy than posit ion-aware services. We conclude that development emphasis should be given to position-aware services but that location-tracking services have a potential for success if users are given a simple option for turning the location-tracking off.

Location aware capabilities can supply context and location sensitive information and support enabling users to be contactable and locatable within a wider mobile environment. These location awareness attributes can also be used to monitor user activities and movement through space and time. This paper explores location aware technologies and the resulting changing privacy and security landscapes for such mobile systems. The paper argues that the real challenge of meeting privacy obligations will be how to limit the joining-up or collaboration between the different monitoring technologies. However, this joining up capability is the very nature of information systems.

The Surveillance Project researches the ways in which personal data are processed. We explore why information about people has become so important in the 21st century and what are the social, political and economic consequences of this trend. Questions of 'privacy' and of 'social sorting' are central to our concerns. For more information, please visit: http://www.queensu.ca/sociology/ Surveillance Note: Coloured text indicates term is found in the Glossary.

2013 IEEE 14th International Conference on Mobile Data Management, 2013

Location-Based Services (LBS) are becoming more prevalent. While there are many benefits, there are also real privacy risks. People are unwilling to give up the benefits-but can we reduce privacy risks without giving up on LBS entirely? This paper explores the possibility of introducing uncertainty into location information when using an LBS, so as to reduce privacy risk while maintaining good quality of service. This paper also explores the current uses of uncertainty information in a selection of mobile applications.

2010

ABSTRACT The rapid adoption of location tracking and mobile social networking technologies raises significant privacy challenges. Today our understanding of people's location sharing privacy preferences remains very limited, including how these preferences are impacted by the type of location tracking device or the nature of the locations visited.

Most existing location privacy solutions suffer from being binary privacy or constrained to either identity, temporal, or spatial data. Furthermore, solutions which try to embrace location privacy more generally suffer from being overly complex. This limits the expressiveness and general applicability of such solutions, the consequence being that different location privacy implementations are restricted in the sense of which attacks they protect against. Furthermore, this makes it difficult to compare different solutions making it hard for developers to choose and add sufficient location privacy. In this paper we present the SITA conceptual model to solve the aforementioned problems. This novel location privacy model advocates simplicity as principle for location privacy, which is divided into the four fundamental dimensions of spatial, identity, temporal, and activity data. Each of these dimensions are divided into five levels of privacy to be easily comprehensible and complete at the same time. To demonstrate the applicability and feasibility of the conceptual model, we propose a general architecture and provide the AndSITA Android implementation. Furthermore, we demonstrate the applicability by developing an example location based service. We observe through these steps how the properties of the SITA conceptual model provides a more comprehensible and expressive way of providing location privacy, that will help bridge the gap between privacy on a conceptual level and practical use. The contribution of this paper is twofold: (1) we provide a complete, yet simple language to discuss and compare existing solutions and (2) we provide a simple architecture which aids developers in adding SITA privacy.