Location-Based Services and the Price of Security (original) (raw)
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Investigating the relationship between Location-Based Services and National Security
TENCON 2005 - 2005 IEEE Region 10 Conference, 2005
Public awareness of national security has increased significantly since September 11, 2001. Literature has discussed ways to respond or prevent breaches of National security with some of these methods employing information technologies, including Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Global Positioning System (GPS). Other studies have focused on the privacy impact the proposed solutions will have. This research examines the technologies under the umbrella of Location-Based Services (LBS). The preliminary findings of this research indicate that the broader notion of LBS is what needs to be focused on in order to understand the impact that they are having in the effort to ensure national security.
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 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.
Control, trust, privacy, and security: evaluating location-based services
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, 2000
Location-based services (LBS) are those applications that utilize the position of an end-user, animal, or thing based on a given device (handheld, wearable, or implanted), for a particular purpose. This article uses scenario planning to identify the possible risks related to location-based services in the context of security and privacy. The original contribution of this article is that the dilemma has been related specifically to LBS, under the privacy-security dichotomy. Here, each side of the dichotomy is divided into three key components that combine to greatly magnify risk. Removing one or more components for each set decreases the privacy or security risk. Where more elements are present in conjunction, the risk is increased.
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.
IATBR Conference, 2009
Location-based services (LBS) are dependent on a knowledge of a real time location, knowledge of the environment, and integrated with communications. An ideal specification for travel data collection. LBS has become pervasive very swiftly, but the implications are not yet widely recognised. The addition of realtime information, response and service providers to the now familiar combination of GPS, and data recording is the focus of the present paper. The business development path to LBS is outlined, and the implications for data gathering, matching and response considered. The privacy and surveillance aspects are of varying sensitivity in different cultures, even within a single country, but the addition of intelligence methods of data gathering add a further layer to existing concerns. The substantial potential of LBS to enable improved understanding, monitoring and management of transport provision and movements are clear, but barriers to its wide adoption are outlined in terms of the cultures of authorities collecting data and those of the subjects of that collection.
Location-Based Services and Privacy in Airports
Human-Computer …, 2009
This paper reports on a study of privacy concerns related to locationbased services in an airport, where users who volunteer for the service will be tracked for a limited period and within a limited area. Reactions elicited from travellers at a field trial showed 60% feeling to some or to a large degree more secure with the system in operation. To provide a background for the privacy study we also describe services provided by the tracking facility and the infrastructure behind it as well as the design and evaluation activities we used. Based on project results including a large number of comments from passengers, we discuss factors influencing passengers' acceptance and appreciation of location-based services in airports.
Evaluating Ethical and Productivity Issues in Geofencing
This paper looks at the ethical and productivity issues affecting Location Based Services (Geofencing) from a management perspective in small medium enterprises. The results were obtained through empirical research collected from 106 organisations. The main paper; "Geofencing as a Security Strategy Model" proposes a new security strategy model; of which the focus of this paper is a part and suggests that ethics and productivity (performance) should form part of a new security solution to wireless networks using location based services. Location Based Services is the delivery of information and services tailored to the current or some projected location and context of the user. Our paper looks specifically how ethics affects the productivity of these services. The findings suggest that the use of Location Based Service did not provide negative concern to most of users or affect the productivity of their application. However, there were some who felt that privacy was being i...
Privacy (Regimes) Do Not Threaten Location Technology Development
2007 International Conference on Mobile Data Management, 2007
Location technology allows for the tracking and tracing of individuals. Users may increasingly be concerned about the abilities of new technology to keep an eye on ones' private life. There are concerns that the increased privacy awareness among citizens and legislation may hinder the success and further development of these technologies. An analysis of the European legal framework for protecting individual's privacy versus private sector use
This paper identifies a number of critical infrastructure applications that are reliant on location services from cooperative location technologies such as GPS and GSM. We show that these location technologies can be represented in a general location model, such that the model components can be used for vulnerability analysis. We perform a vulnerability analysis on these components of GSM and GPS location systems as well as a number of augmentations to these systems.
The Risks and Regulation of Location
2010
In the last ten years, concerns about location privacy have evolved from an academic topic that struggled to justify concerns about security to a mainstream issue that is affecting consumers, businesses and the legal system. Much of this proliferation of concerns arises from telecommunication and mobile computing platforms. Smart phones and GPS-assisted devices play an increasing role in people's lives, and the technology of precise and easily obtained location information has imbued mobile and social media with location in advance of the public knowing how that information will be used and fully grasping the implication of pervasive location information. Furthermore, social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, How can consumers understand and control how and when their information is being used or distributed and who has access to it? In this paper, we briefly describe the technologies that underlie location-based services, their access and the notion of how location can be linked or inferred from multiple sources. We then survey common visible and hidden uses of location services, including social networks and emergency services. The technical community has developed a number of methods to hide or mask locations to provide a degree of anonymity while still preserving the benefit of location services. We briefly survey those methods and the "threat models" they seek to counter. We then describe threat models, or disclosures of location information, not commonly considered by the research community and their implications. We lastly turn our attention to the policy implications of these technologies and the potential concerns that they present in terms of user privacy and safety. The technical community has long used automated policy descriptions to inform users about how their data will be used, but these mechanisms do not address location privacy. We theorize that it may be possible to enhance these methods to support location services based on some of the threat models that researchers have specified, but that broader concerns about location privacy can not rely on technical solutions and will need to rely on both education, good corporate citizenship and regulation.