Teresa Scassa and Anca Sattler, “Location-Based Services and Privacy”, forthcoming in (2011) Canadian Journal of Law and Technology
The last decade has seen a rapid growth in the number and variety of location-based services that are available to consumers. These include applications that permit users to call up a variety of different information about their current locations. Location-based services (LBS) also allow individuals to share their location with friends in a wide range of social networking contexts. Location-based services also permit information to be pushed automatically to users based on their location.
Many location-based services offer real benefits to users. Yet LBS raises inevitable user privacy concerns. 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.
In this paper we begin by describing 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 such services raise. We also explore some technological methods to address the privacy challenges raised by location-based services. The paper concludes with a series of recommendations.
