Location and tracking of mobile devices: Überveillance stalks the streets (original) (raw)
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Location Technologies: Mobility, Surveillance and Privacy
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.
Pinpointing consent: location privacy, public safety, and mobile phones
the Conference on the Global and Local in Mobile …, 2004
Accompanying the growing interest in emerging location based services has been an urgent but rather ambiguous concern shared among scholars, privacy advocates and the general public that enhanced safety will come at the expense of personal privacy. Precision tracking of mobile devices has raised the spectre of unwanted and pervasive surveillance from both state and commercial interests. This juxtaposition of public safety with fears over loss of privacy raises important questions about appropriate collection, use, and disclosure of personal information in the context of mobile phone services and network-enabled devices in general. This paper will report on findings from an ongoing study that is looking at initiatives to introduce location-based services for public safety in the United States, Canada, and Europe. It will address a number of aspects of these developments by drawing on official regulatory and policy sources. In particular, this paper will examine the various legal and regulatory aspects related to the conditions by which "consent" is established for collection, use, and disclosure of location information generated by mobile phones and other mobile access technologies.
Emerging forms of covert surveillance using GPS-enabled devices
2011
This paper presents the real possibility that commercial mobile tracking and monitoring solutions will become widely adopted for the practice of non-traditional covert surveillance within a community setting, resulting in community members engaging in the covert observation of family, friends, or acquaintances. This paper investigates five stakeholder relationships using scenarios to demonstrate the potential socio-ethical implications that tracking and monitoring people will have on society at large. The five stakeholder types explored in this paper include: (i) husband-wife (partner-partner), (ii) parent-child, (iii) employer-employee, (iv) friend-friend, and (v) stranger-stranger. Mobile technologies such as mobile camera phones, global positioning system data loggers, spatial street databases, radio-frequency identification and other pervasive computing can be used to gather real-time, detailed evidence for or against a given position in a given context. There are currently limited laws and ethical guidelines for members of the community to follow when it comes to what is or is not permitted when using unobtrusive technologies to capture multimedia, and other data (e.g. longitude and latitude waypoints) that can be electronically chronicled. The evident risks associated with such practices are presented and explored herein.
Covert Policing using Unobtrusive Global Positioning Systems Trackers: A Demonstration
2009
The workshop addresses the application of covert surveillance techniques in policing and their social implications. The workshop presentations are drawn from cross-disciplinary fields including policing and intelligence studies; criminology and criminal justice; Information and Communication Technologies (ICT); law, ethics, human rights and public policy.
Location-Based Services and the Privacy-Security Dichotomy
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 wideranging 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.
Surveillance, Privacy, and App Tracking
2020
Over the last several months, global innovators have developed a heterogenous array of “smart” technology protocols and applications aimed at tracking, tracing, and containing the spread of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, which causes the disease COVID-19. The United States, which has left it to the states to acquire or build their own automated track and trace platforms, currently lags behind other countries. However, technology companies Apple and Google have announced co-production of a digital tracing platform for their phones. As this Chapter details, the United States lacks a comprehensive federal health data privacy law that protects the privacy of sensitive information collected and stored by digital contact tracking applications. The Chapter also explains how digital COVID-19 surveillance applications work, assesses their effectiveness from a public health perspective, and enumerates the legal and ethical issues they implicate. It concludes with proposals aimed at maximi...
No place to hide? The ethics and analytics of tracking mobility using mobile phone data
This paper examines the ethical and methodological problems with tracking human mobility using data from mobile phones, focusing on research involving low-and middle-income countries. Such datasets are becoming accessible to an increasingly broad community of researchers and data scientists, with a variety of analytical and policy uses proposed. This paper provides an overview of the state of the art in this area of research, then sets out a new analytical framework for such data sources that focuses on three pressing issues: first, interpretation and disciplinary bias; second, the potential risks to data subjects in LMICs and possible ethical responses; and third, the likelihood of 'function creep' from benign to less benign uses. Using the case study of a data science challenge involving West African mobile phone data, I argue that human mobility is becoming legible in new, more detailed ways, and that this carries with it the dual risk of rendering certain groups invisible and of misinterpreting what is visible. Thus this emerging ability to track movement in real time offers both the possibility of improved responses to conflict and forced migration, but also unprecedented power to surveil and control unwanted population movement.
Privacy Implications of Automated GPS Tracking and Profiling
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, 2010
Recent advancements in GPS technology have opened new avenues for its use in the automotive sector. While GPS is a self-positioning system and does not threaten locational privacy , its availability in telematics systems enables various privacy abuses both in real-time and retrospect. GPS devices are being used for surreptitious monitoring, for providing alibis and more recently, by the government to access telematics-generated GPS data for complementing their mass surveillance projects. While researchers have presented theoretical studies of privacy abuses and their countermeasures, limited research has been conducted to assess these threats in a real-life scenario involving data obtained from people. This paper aims to raise awareness about privacy issues created as a result of GPS-based surveillance by conducting an experiment involving collecting positional data from a number of volunteers. A software protocol is implemented which takes this GPS data as input and produces profiles of road behaviour, social activities and work activities of the volunteers. Interviews are conducted with the volunteers to assess the accuracy of this profiling. Results suggest that while these profiles can be highly predictive of personality traits, they may also be misleading due to technical limitations and inaccuracies. Positional data is highly detailed and it is important to negotiate the function, storage and use of such data so that future telematics systems do not impinge upon privacy rights of motorists.
2007
The objective of this paper is to explore the role of human tracking technology, primarily the use of global positioning systems (GPS) in locating individuals for the purposes of mutual legal assistance (MLA), and providing location intelligence for use in interstate police cooperation within the context of transnational crime. GPS allows for the 24/7 continuous real-time tracking of an individual, and is considered manifold more powerful than the traditional visual surveillance often exercised by the police. As the use of GPS for human tracking grows in the law enforcement sector, federal and state laws in many countries are to a great extent undefined or even contradictory, especially regarding the need to obtain warrants before the deployment of location surveillance equipment. This leaves courts ruling on transnational crimes in the precarious position of having to rely on age-old precedents which are completely void to the new capabilities of today's tracking technologies. On one side of the debate are civil libertarians who believe the individual's right to be let alone is being eroded to the compromise of human rights, and on the other side are law enforcement agencies who wish to provide more precise evidence to judges and juries during hearings against suspects (particularly in issues pertaining to national security). This paper argues that there is a radical middle position, the via media: that a warrant process is legislatively defined and not only for MLAs but also to formalise existing informal interstate police cooperation. Safeguards are required to overcome the potential misuse of human tracking technologies by police officials and others in positions of power. And this particularly in light of the emerging implantable high-tech identification and tracking devices now commercially available.