You are where you’ve been: the privacy implications of location and tracking technologies

A decade ago, technologies that could provide information about the location of a motor vehicle, or a computer or a person, were in their infancy. A wide range of tools, processes and systems are now in use and in prospect, which threaten to strip away another layer of the limited protections that individuals enjoy. An understanding of the landscape of location and tracking technologies, and of the issues that they give rise to, depends on establishing a specialist language that enables meaningful and reasonably unambiguous discussion to take place. An outline of the familiar case of mobile phones, complemented by deeper assessments of road tolling and the surveillance of individual motor vehicles on the road, provides a basis for appreciation of the substantial threats that location technologies represent to free society. This investigation describes location-based systems’ generic privacy threats, and identifies such specific threats as psychological harm, social harm, behavioural profiling, political harm and actual repression. Controls and protections are identified to counter these threats to privacy.