Thoughts on “A geoprivacy manifesto”

This paper proposes 21 theses that summarize the main arguments related to geoprivacy. It argues that geoprivacy has mainly be addressed isolatedly from the technological and ethical points of view. There is a lack of integrative research on technological, ethical, economical, legal, and educational aspects of geoprivacy.

The concern of geoprivacy has been discussed a lot in previous GIScience topics. The concerns are largely due to the increasing amount of location data shared with external parties. Such concern can be intensified with GeoAI increasingly applied to make inference at a larger scale. This makes geoprivacy an important topic to discuss from various perspectives as discussed in this paper.

Most of the time we are talking about how locational devices infringe upon our privacy, whereas this article brings up an interesting point of how location information can be used for the good. One of the theses argues that individuals have the incentive to share their location information with providers for better services. Another similar situation is the use of locational data for better surveillance in the cities. This brings up the question of how much we should care about geoprivacy vs. better service, and how much we should preserve an individua’s right to privacy vs. better public surveillance.

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