Location-based Services: an Interdisciplinary Approach

There exists a wide variety of location-based services (LBSs) that simplify our daily life. While engaging with LBSs, we disseminate accurate location data to remote machines and thus lose control over our data. It is well known that this raises significant privacy concerns as access to accurate location data may reveal sensitive information about an individual. In this work, we investigate the privacy implications of LBSs from a joint perspective of engineering, legal and ethical disciplines. We first outline from a technical perspective how user location data is potentially being dissiminated. Second, we employ the Contextual Integrity (CI) heuristic, an ethical approach developed by Helen Nissenbaum, to establish whether and if so, how, the dissemination of location data breaches the users’ privacy. Third, we show how the concept of purpose limitation (PL) helps to clarify the restrictions on the dissemination of location data from a legal perspective. Our interdisciplinary approach allows us to highlight the privacy issues of LBSs in a more comprehensive manner than singular disciplinary exercises afford, and it enables us to contribute towards a better understanding among the relevant disciplines. Additionally, our case study allows us to provide two further contributions that are of separate interest. We address the problem of competing prevailing contexts without suggesting that the ensuing incompatability of informational norms can be resolved theoretically, even though it must be resolved in practice. This ties in with the difference between a legal approach that has to align justice with legal certainty and an ethics approach that aims 1 PhD student at Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography (COSIC) at KU Leuven, iMinds. 2 Professor at Research Group on Law, Science, Technology and Society (LSTS), Vrije Universiteit Brussel; Professor of Smart Environments, Data Protection and the Rule of Law at institute of Computing and Information Sciences (iCIS), Radboud University Nijmegen. 3 PhD candidate at Research Group on Law, Science, Technology and Society (LSTS), Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium; Lawyer at White & Case Brussels, Belgium. 4 Professor at Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography (COSIC) at KU Leuven, iMinds.  The research for this article was funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) for the 4-year interdisciplinary research project on ‘Contextual privacy and the proliferation of location data’. (2016) 13:2 SCRIPTed 145 to align prevailing social norms with moral reasoning. In the end, our interdisciplinary research shows how CI and PL are in many ways complementary. 10.2966/scrip.130216.144 © Michael Herrmann, Mireille Hildebrandt, Laura Tielemans and Claudia Diaz 2016. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. Please click on the link to read the terms and conditions. (2016) 13:2 SCRIPTed 146