Privacy in Location-Based Services: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Abstract

There exists a wide variety of location-based services (LBSs) that simplify our daily life. While engaging with LBSs, we disseminate accurate location data to remote machines and thus lose control over our data. It is well known that this raises significant privacy concerns as access to accurate location data may reveal sensitive information about an individual. In this work, we investigate the privacy implications of LBSs from a joint perspective of engineering, legal and ethical disciplines. We first outline from a technical perspective how user location data is potentially being dissiminated. Second, we employ the Contextual Integrity (CI) heuristic, an ethical approach developed by Helen Nissenbaum, to establish whether and if so, how, the dissemination of location data breaches the users’ privacy. Third, we show how the concept of purpose limitation (PL) helps to clarify the restrictions on the dissemination of location data from a legal perspective. Our interdisciplinary approach allows us to highlight the privacy issues of LBSs in a more comprehensive manner than singular disciplinary exercises afford, and it enables us to contribute towards a better understanding among the relevant disciplines. Additionally, our case study allows us to provide two further contributions that are of separate interest. We address the problem of competing prevailing contexts without suggesting that the ensuing incompatability of informational norms can be resolved theoretically, even though it must be resolved in practice. This ties in with the difference between a legal approach that has to align justice with legal certainty and an ethics approach that aims to align prevailing social norms with moral reasoning. In the end, our interdisciplinary research shows how CI and PL are in many ways complementary.