A geoprivacy manifesto

The article presents a review on the individual location privacy issues by telling a little story of a couple’s one day life which is really interesting and easy for readers to understand how location privacy issues take place in everyone’s daily life. It is really a good paper explaining the basic concepts of geoprivacy and how it is produced and utilized, together with some profits and threatens that individual location brings about. From my perspectives, it is apparent that individual location information would bring great profits for politics, businesses, academics etc. because it provides the data sources for further human driven research analysis, prediction and other uses, helping understand the human behaviors for further profit-making applications. However, the debate about how sharing location information harms individual privacy keeps emerges. As it is referred to in the article, one big difference in geoprivacy and other privacy issue is the claim of individuals to determine whether to use or share the location information. Usually when people open an app or other services requesting location permission, they always decide whether to use the location services though there may be risks of utility for their individual location information. Depending on advantages of what it brings, people usually agree to share their location information. Thus, what I think matters most is to tell the users what kinds of risks and potential use of their location information and to regulate more on who will have the access to those information and restrict rules on proposal of using public individual location information. How GIScience would assist in those regulations and help if it is possible to conduct better location based human studies without revealing individual privacy inforamtion.

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