"Who goes where?" - Privacy for Location Based Services
Date: Wednesday 23 March 2011
Time: 12.30 - 17.30
Venue: CSR, Churchill House, Cambridge Business Park, Cowley Road, Cambridge CB4 0WZ
The 'Who Goes Where?' event brought together speakers from product design, research and development, law and academia to discuss some of the emerging concerns around privacy and security that are presented by locative data and its applications. With the increasing saturation of mobile wireless devices (including smart phones and tablet PCs), locative web services (which store data about user location for a range of purposes, from social networking to specifically-targeted advertisements) constitute a growing segment of the present internet ecology.
Kanwar Chadha of CSR opened the presentations by reflecting on the historical transition from a time when media devices, computers, voice telephony, time-measuring devices (e.g. the watch) and navigations systems were discrete objects, to the present, when all of these technologies are unified and interrelated. The integration of these services through smart phone technology and cloud computing, Chadha pointed out, allows data relating to all of them to be compiled at once, presenting complex issues around security and privacy. Chadha closed his paper by calling for a new legal and business framework to manage the potential abuse of location-specific data based on the principle of "relevant location", including keeping location data accessible only by the user unless a specific service needs it, specifying explicit user choice as central to location-sharing services, limiting the specificity of data to the minimum a given service needs to function and taking steps to prevent the logging of data that is tied to specific users. Chadha's presentation set out the key themes for the day, which were taken up by the subsequent speakers.
Dr Andrew Matthews from the Nokia Research Centre focused on consumer concerns around privacy in the context of the growing mobile search and application market, and presented a number of technologies and approaches for balancing user experience with privacy including privacy-triggered networking, proxy services such as Privacy Broker and the Mobile Millennium travel information system.
Patrick Clark from Taylor Wessing presented an overview of the legal issues surrounding location-based services in the context of pre-existing privacy legislation, which predates cloud computing and today's wide usage of mobile networking. Concerns about user consent and data retention were placed in a useful legal context by this presentation.
Jonathan Raper from Placr presented the First Location Bank, a location brokering service which allows users to manage, and potentially monetise, their locative data.
Finally, Dr David Skinner from Anglia Ruskin worked through some of the issues of reductiveness and totalisation surrounding data-based services, which foreground the simple fact of where a user was over qualitative specifics relating to their experience, access or mobility. Using a range of examples, from police crime maps to the website Chavtowns, Skinner examined the way in which location data and statistical analysis produces normative models, defining the entirety of a given area according to the behaviour of certain specific individuals or groups. This paper provided an excellent counterpoint to those that preceded it, by accounting for some of the many subjective experiences that cannot be accounted for by locative data.
All presentations from the event are now available to view below in pdf format.
This half-day Cambridge Wireless event was a collaboration with Cultures of the Digital Economy Research Institute. We are very grateful to CSR for sponsoring and hosting this event.
Time: 12.30 - 17.30
Venue: CSR, Churchill House, Cambridge Business Park, Cowley Road, Cambridge CB4 0WZ
The 'Who Goes Where?' event brought together speakers from product design, research and development, law and academia to discuss some of the emerging concerns around privacy and security that are presented by locative data and its applications. With the increasing saturation of mobile wireless devices (including smart phones and tablet PCs), locative web services (which store data about user location for a range of purposes, from social networking to specifically-targeted advertisements) constitute a growing segment of the present internet ecology.
Kanwar Chadha of CSR opened the presentations by reflecting on the historical transition from a time when media devices, computers, voice telephony, time-measuring devices (e.g. the watch) and navigations systems were discrete objects, to the present, when all of these technologies are unified and interrelated. The integration of these services through smart phone technology and cloud computing, Chadha pointed out, allows data relating to all of them to be compiled at once, presenting complex issues around security and privacy. Chadha closed his paper by calling for a new legal and business framework to manage the potential abuse of location-specific data based on the principle of "relevant location", including keeping location data accessible only by the user unless a specific service needs it, specifying explicit user choice as central to location-sharing services, limiting the specificity of data to the minimum a given service needs to function and taking steps to prevent the logging of data that is tied to specific users. Chadha's presentation set out the key themes for the day, which were taken up by the subsequent speakers.
Dr Andrew Matthews from the Nokia Research Centre focused on consumer concerns around privacy in the context of the growing mobile search and application market, and presented a number of technologies and approaches for balancing user experience with privacy including privacy-triggered networking, proxy services such as Privacy Broker and the Mobile Millennium travel information system.
Patrick Clark from Taylor Wessing presented an overview of the legal issues surrounding location-based services in the context of pre-existing privacy legislation, which predates cloud computing and today's wide usage of mobile networking. Concerns about user consent and data retention were placed in a useful legal context by this presentation.
Jonathan Raper from Placr presented the First Location Bank, a location brokering service which allows users to manage, and potentially monetise, their locative data.
Finally, Dr David Skinner from Anglia Ruskin worked through some of the issues of reductiveness and totalisation surrounding data-based services, which foreground the simple fact of where a user was over qualitative specifics relating to their experience, access or mobility. Using a range of examples, from police crime maps to the website Chavtowns, Skinner examined the way in which location data and statistical analysis produces normative models, defining the entirety of a given area according to the behaviour of certain specific individuals or groups. This paper provided an excellent counterpoint to those that preceded it, by accounting for some of the many subjective experiences that cannot be accounted for by locative data.
All presentations from the event are now available to view below in pdf format.
This half-day Cambridge Wireless event was a collaboration with Cultures of the Digital Economy Research Institute. We are very grateful to CSR for sponsoring and hosting this event.
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