Location Privacy

From CFPWiki

A variety of developments — greater surveillance of public space, convenient location-based services (implemented on mobile platforms like smartphones and in-car devices), and transportation system design — threaten location privacy. This panel will focus first on the law, with special attention to current areas of judicial, legislative and regulatory activity, and then on the technical feasibility of building systems that balance legitimate information needs with privacy, using modern cryptography and careful system design.

Speakers

• Lee Tien: Senior Staff Attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
• Andrew Blumberg: Assistant Professor of Mathematics, University of Texas at Austin.

Detailed description

We've entered an era where a variety of developments — greater surveillance of public space, convenient location-based services (implemented on mobile platforms like smartphones and in-car devices), and transportation system design — threaten location privacy, i.e., our ability to move in public space with the reasonable expectation that our location will not be systematically and secretly recorded.

Neither the law nor people's intuition is keeping up with these changes; this is a classic example of where the scale transition from inexpensive (a policeman follows your car) to free (police mine the location database) will cause a dramatic change in the possibilities for abuse.

This panel will focus first on the law, with special attention to current areas of judicial, legislative and regulatory activity, and then on the technical feasibility of building systems that balance legitimate information needs with privacy, using modern cryptography and careful system design. Work on practical versions of such systems may well be needed to combat the trend toward pervasive tracking systems.