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Privacy

The word privacy stems from the Latin root privare, which means “to separate.” To want privacy is to want to be separate, to be by oneself, and to be left alone. In the United States, the establishment of privacy as a right originated from a 1928 Supreme Court opinion by Justice Louis Brandeis, in which the right to be left alone was said to be one of “the most comprehensive of rights and the right most cherished by civilized men.” Conceptually, privacy is an individual human right that prevents others from intruding, appropriating, and disclosing information of a private and personal nature. A person has the right to determine when, how, and to what extent information about his or her personal life may be communicated to others. The use of increasingly available personal locational data in GIS has recently raised many questions about how this technology might threaten individual privacy.

GIS and Invasion of Privacy

GIS are often used to analyze markets by geocoding customer addresses and cross-referencing the results with other data, such as point-of-sale data related to the use of credit cards and store discount cards. The maps produced by GIS make excellent tools for marketing applications, from site selection to creating targeted mailing lists for direct advertising. Geospatial technologies have been used to track, store, and analyze personal information for commercial applications, particularly those in the location-based services (LBS) sector. Such services rely on the highly enriched “intelligent” geospatial data for profiling, targeted marketing, and advertising campaigns. The threat to personal privacy arises from the potential to make inferences about individuals by correlating geographic information with personal information. These capabilities give geospatial technologies the potential to be more invasive of personal privacy than most other technologies.

Privacy Right

Privacy as a right or a personal choice in most countries attracts no general protection either in common law or as a constitutional guarantee. However, the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) recognize a right to privacy. Similarly, the European Convention on Human Rights (1966) and the European Union Data Protection Directive (95/46) protect the use of personal and sensitive data. The European Union Directive protects personal and “sensitive data” by requiring explicit informed consent for the release of data that pertains to information on racial, political, health, religious, and trade union affiliation.

How Sensitive are Locational Data?

This is a question of balance, as what may be very sensitive information to some will be unimportant to others. Locational data may be deemed sensitive for those in fear of harassment, such as single women living alone. Others are happy to broadcast their location at any time through the use of mobile phones with global positioning systems (GPS) capabilities in order to make use of various LBS now available. The degree of accuracy and level of resolution of data collected by a specific technology may define the extent of an intrusion on personal privacy.

Locational Privacy

Giving away information on one's location is usually associated with applications such as mobile telephones and location-based services, such as point-of-access billing and marketing. But the use of the mobile phone can be highly intrusive of privacy, especially if it is used as a tracking device. Furthermore, digital maps created in combination with personal GPS data can provide highly detailed information on the location and movement of a person.

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