The impact of the European privacy regime on location technology development

Abstract

Location technology allows for the tracking and tracing of individuals. Developments in location technology allow for increasing levels of detail to keep an eye on ones private life. There are concerns that the privacy awareness among citizens and privacy legislation hinders the success and further development of these technologies. This article assesses the extent to which European privacy legislation blocks location technology development. This is accomplished through a detailed analysis of the Dutch legal framework and an overall review of the European legal framework for protecting individual's privacy versus private sector use of location information and public sector use in the intelligence services. The analysis shows that privacy legislation puts users of terminal devices in control of the decision if and when his location information may be used by private sector location-based services providers. Users often seem willing to allow this, judging by the increase in available location-based services. Privacy legislation is not as protective regarding the use for law enforcement and secret intelligence purposes: privacy of mobile device users may be intruded for these purposes. Certainly after 9/11, developments in law are directed at increasing the mandates of law enforcement and intelligence services. Therefore, the location technology industry is likely to prosper from the investments of the public intelligence sector. For both privacy law legislating private sector use of location-based services and legislation for (secret) public sector use, this article shows that the European privacy regime does not endanger further location technology development.

Location-based services deployment and demand: a roadmap model

“…With the major network operators actively promoting LBS, LBS deployment has been relatively successful and has generated customer demand, with a number of applications offering dynamic content [4,48,60]. It is expected that the location technology industry will take advantage of the increased investments in the public safety sector [61]. Predicted growth in 2010 is 18 million LBS users, with almost 50 percent of them using navigation services [62].…”

Transport and Surveillance Aspects of Location-Based Services

“…(22) Clearly, some users are apparently not as sensitive about some LBSs as they might be were they fully aware of the cumulative recordlinking capacities of such services. They will pay for them (23), and their specific consent is needed under European privacy legislation (24). Pelsys (25) in South Australia already offers personal tracking via mobile phones as a commercial service for employers to track their staff and even to take pictures and transfer them to a monitoring base station as part of the service.…”