“Location-Based Services and Privacy”, (T. Scassa & Anca Sattler) (2011) 9:2 Canadian Journal of Law and Technology 99-134
The last decade has seen a rapid growth in the number and variety of location-based services that are available to consumers. While some of the older location-based services are tools such as GPS and other navigation systems, more recent innovations include applications that permit users to call up a variety of different information about their current locations, such as the nearest Italian restaurant, or the best deals at a favourite store. Location-based services (LBS) also allow individuals to share their location with friends in a wide range of social networking contexts. Location-based services are already shifting from pull to push applications. Information can now be pushed automatically to users based on their location. The options for such services are virtually limitless, and include mobile-marketing, public transportation applications, information about local points of interest, health care applications connected to remote treatment systems, or tools to find the closest election-day polling booth.
There is no doubt that many location-based services offer real benefits to users. Yet location-based services raise inevitable user privacy concerns. These concerns operate on multiple levels and involve many players. In some applications, privacy issues will arise between individual users, where, for example, applications permit the tracking of movements of family members, co-workers or “friends”. Location-based services may also result in the collection of a new layer of personal information about consumers by private sector companies. Information about individuals and their movements has meaningful commercial value, and the potential for the collection, use and disclosure of this information is significant. Location-based services also raise the spectre of state surveillance of individual activity – either concurrent with an individual’s movements (tracking), or retrospectively, through searching records of individual patterns of movement. These are just some of the contexts in which privacy issues are raised.
In this paper we describe location-based services, their evolution and their future directions. We then outline privacy issues raised by such services. We consider how current Canadian data protection laws apply to location-based services, and indicate where such laws fall short of addressing the full range of issues raised by location-based services. We also explore some technological methods to address the privacy challenges raised by location-based services. The paper concludes with a series of recommendations.
