Location Privacy in the Wake of the GDPR

Abstract

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) protects the personal data of natural persons and at the same time allows the free movement of such data within the European Union (EU). Hailed as majestic by admirers and dismissed as protectionist by critics, the Regulation is expected to have a profound impact around the world, including in the African Union (AU). For European–African consortia conducting research that may affect the privacy of African citizens, the question is ‘how to protect personal data of data subjects while at the same time ensuring a just distribution of the benefits of a global digital ecosystem?’ We use location privacy as a point of departure, because information about an individual’s location is different from other kinds of personally identifiable information. We analyse privacy at two levels, individual and cultural. Our perspective is interdisciplinary: we draw from computer science to describe three scenarios of transformation of volunteered/observed information to inferred information about a natural person and from cultural theory to distinguish four privacy cultures emerging within the EU in the wake of GDPR. We highlight recent data protection legislation in the AU and discuss factors that may accelerate or inhibit the alignment of data protection legislation in the AU with the GDPR.

Collaborative Indoor Positioning Systems: A Systematic Review

“…None of the reviewed works = considered the privacy of the users nor the security of the CIPSs. Privacy is a main overarching concern that has already been regulated in many countries (e.g., the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) [ 163 ]). The vast majority of positioning solutions (in the non-collaborative and collaborative phase) rely on communication technologies that can be attacked (i.e., jamming or spoofing mainly) to alter the outputs of the positioning system and/or the sensing data processed by the user, which might be considered a security breach of the CIPS.…”

Geographically Masking Addresses to Study COVID-19 Clusters

“…The debates on the applications tracking the users to avoid SARS-Cov-2 spreading show that the right for location privacy is now well acknowledged in many countries. In Europe, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) protects personal data (Georgiadou, de By, & Kounadi, 2019), and location information can cause locationbased spam, attacks to personal safety, or intrusive inferences (Duckham & Kulik, 2006). When location and specifically the address is attached to health data, it can reveal even more important personal information.…”