Over the next decade, systems which create and store digital records of people’s movements through public space will be woven inextricably into the fabric of everyday life. We are already starting to see such systems now, and there will be many more in the near future.

Here are some examples you might already have used or read about:

• Monthly transit swipe-cards
• Electronic tolling devices (FastTrak, EZpass, congestion pricing)
• Cellphones
• Services telling you when your friends are nearby
• Searches on your PDA for services and businesses near your current location
• Free Wi-Fi with ads for businesses near the network access point you’re using
• Electronic swipe cards for doors
• Parking meters you can call to add money to, and which send you a text message when your time is running out

These systems are marvellously innovative, and they promise benefits ranging from increased convenience to transformative new kinds of social interaction.

Unfortunately, these systems pose a dramatic threat to locational privacy.

And today, the New York Times has an op-ed by Adam Cohen lamenting the threats to locational privacy in our contemporary technological ecosystem:

A little-appreciated downside of the technology revolution is that, mainly without thinking about it, we have given up “locational privacy.” Even in low-tech days, our movements were not entirely private. The desk attendant at my gym might have recalled seeing me, or my colleagues might have remembered when I arrived. Now the information is collected automatically and often stored indefinitely.

It’s good to see this attention to locational privacy, but it’s equally important to recognize that these threats aren’t new: I’ve been blogging and advocating for attention to privacy in public, privacy on the roads, and locational privacy for a number of years now (and I’m certainly not the only one). I’ve also published about particular threats to privacy on the roads (here and here), and tried (with limited success) to engage with designers of new vehicle-technologies to design privacy into the new protocols.

I’m thrilled to see the EFF draw renewed attention to locational privacy. I just hope they’re not too late to start advocating for change…

I’m thrilled to announce that, after a peer review process and the hard work of David Matheson, a collection of papers from this conference has been published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in an edited volume, “Contours of Privacy”. From the description:

The contours of privacy—its particular forms and our reasons for valuing it—are numerous and varied. This book explores privacy’s contours in a series of essays on such themes as the relationship between privacy and social accountability, privacy in and beyond anonymity, the psychology of privacy, and the privacy concerns of emerging information technologies.

The book’s international and multidisciplinary group of contributors provides rich insights about privacy that will be of great interest not only to the scholarly privacy community at large but also to professionals, academics, and laypersons who understand that the contours of privacy weave themselves throughout wide swaths of life in present-day society.

The stylistically accessible yet scholarly rigorous nature of The Contours of Privacy, along with the diversity of perspectives it offers, set it apart as one of the most important additions to the privacy literature on the contemporary scene.

I feel privileged to have an expanded version of my original paper included in this volume: “Privacy on the Roads: Mobility, Vehicle Safety Communication Technologies, and the Contextual Integrity of Personal Information Flows”.

The full table of contents is after the fold.

Introduction
Exploring the Contours of Privacy
David Matheson……………………………………………………………………………..vii

Part I: Privacy, Anonymity and Accountability

Chapter One
Scoping Anonymity in Cases of Compelled Disclosure of Identity:
Lessons from BMG v. Doe
Ian Kerr & Alex Cameron…………………………………………………………………3

Chapter Two
Xenophon and the City without Walls
J. Hugh Hunter……………………………………………………………………………….31

Part II: Privacy In and Beyond Anonymity

Chapter Three
Context and Construction: Connecting Privacy, Anonymity
and Identity
Marsha Hanen………………………………………………………………………………..51

Chapter Four
Anonymity and Privacy: Conceptual Links and Normative
Implications
Travis Dumsday……………………………………………………………………………..71

Chapter Five
Anonymity in 12-Step Groups: An Anthropological Approach
Catarina Frois………………………………………………………………………………..85

Part III: Privacy and the Mind

Chapter Six
Privacy as Commodity: Divulgence as Diversion
Aritha van Herk……………………………………………………………………………109

Chapter Seven
Privacy and Psychology
Stephen T. Margulis……………………………………………………………………..131

Chapter Eight
Privacy, Rights, and Moral Value
Steven Davis………………………………………………………………………………..153

Part IV: Privacy and Emerging Technologies

Chapter Nine
Data Protection versus Privacy: Lessons from Facebook’s Beacon
Valerie Steeves…………………………………………………………………………….183

Chapter Ten
Information Revelation and Privacy in Online Social Networks
Ralph Gross & Alessandro Acquisti………………………………………………..197

Chapter Eleven
Privacy on the Roads: Mobility, Vehicle Safety Communication
Technologies, and the Contextual Integrity of Personal Information Flows
Michael Zimmer…………………………………………………………………………..219

Chapter Twelve
Privacy Outside the Castle: Surveillance Technologies and Reasonable
Expectations of Privacy in Canadian Judicial Reasoning
Krista Boa……………………………………………………………………………………241

Contributors…………………………………………………………………………………263

Index…………………………………………………………………………………………..265

The brief article notes “There will probably also be privacy concerns.” Yep, and you can read my article on how the design and implementation of Vehicle-to-Vehicle and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure Safety Communication technologies threaten the contextual integrity of personal information flows as we drive along the highways.

(FWIW, Popular Science covered VSC about 18 months ago.)

The 7th Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals has ruled against a defendant who claimed that the surreptitious placement of a GPS tracking device amounted to an unconstitutional search. From the court’s decision:

The police had not obtained a warrant authorizing them to place the GPS tracker on the defendant’s car. The district judge, however, found that they had had a reasonable suspicion that the defendant was engaged in criminal activity, and she ruled that reasonable suspicion was all they needed for a lawful search, although she added that they had had probable cause as well. The defendant argues that they needed not only probable cause to believe that the search would turn up contraband or evidence of crime, but also a warrant. The government argues that they needed nothing because there was no search or seizure within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.

So while the fourth amendment protects against unreasonable search and seizure, the court ruled that the placement of a GPS tracking device without the suspect’s knowledge does not qualify as a search of his car. The court equated GPS tracking to police physically following a car, or monitoring safety cameras to follow a car, neither of which amounts to illegal search and seizure. I completely disagree: see my various arguments on the issue here, and my article on the topic here.

[via GPS Tracking Systems blog]

Still to be done: Federal legislation on the type of information that can be collected, who can access it, how it can be used, and how it can (or cannot) be shared with 3rd parties.

Bucholz, who designed some of the first mobile license plate reading, or LPR, equipment, gave a presentation at the 2006 National Institute of Justice conference here last week laying out a vision of the future in which LPR does everything from helping insurance companies find missing cars to letting retail chains chart customer migrations. It could also let a nosy citizen with enough cash find out if the mayor is having an affair, he says.

Not only are we becoming normalized to state surveillance of our everyday activities, we are being encouraged to surveil one another with these tools. Unbelievable.
[via Concurring Opinions]

The piece introduces new research – “the adaptation of defense technology” – to automatically count the number of people in a vehicle so road authorities can charge variable tolls based on vehicle occupancy. These new methods include counting heartbeats, listening for and distinguishing breath signs, sensing different levels of body heat, sensing human skin moisture levels, or (and I’m not sure how this would be implemented) reading passenger fingerprints.

Reaching into the car and searching the passengers in such manners introduce significant shifts in the norms of personal information flow in the context of highway travel, and steps must be taken to ensure these new technologies are designed in value-conscious ways. Santa Clara University law professor Dorothy Glancy agrees:

You can make data anonymous by policy and it’s just a matter of time before policy breaks down. You have to engineer [privacy] into the system.

[via Pogo Was Right]

This grant will support my dissertation research of the value implications of two emerging technologies of everyday life: networked vehicle systems and web search engines. Networked vehicle systems (GPS-based navigational tools, automated toll collection, automobile black boxes, and vehicle safety communication systems) rely on the transmission, collection and aggregation of a particular vehicle’s location and telemetry data. The drive towards the “perfect” web search engine (providing personalized results and delivering only relevant advertising) depends on the profiling of users’ online activities and interests. Taken together, these technologies represent emerging threats to one’s “privacy on the roads”: on the one hand, networked vehicle systems enable the widespread surveillance of drivers traveling on the public highways, and on the other, a perfect search engine facilitates the monitoring and aggregation of one’s intellectual activities on the information superhighway.

Specifically, this grant will allow me to travel to three specialized research sites that will make theoretical, material, and pragmatic contributions to my project:

• Center for Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Science, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands, where I will study with Prof. Philip Brey to enrich my investigation of the relationship between values and technology, and work alongside both philosophers and engineers sensitive to the value implications of technology
• Department of Philosophy and the History of Technology, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, where I will work alongside Prof. Sven Ove Hansson and other scholars dedicated to the ethics of traffic technology, and observe pragmatic interventions within Swedish automotive and technical communities
• Culturally Embedded Computing Group, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, where I will study with Prof. Phoebe Sengers to help gain a critical understanding of the relationship between technology and culture, and witness the application of critical technical practice to real design situations

I am very excited about this opportunity, which wouldn’t be possible without the guidance of my dissertation chair, Prof. Helen Nissenbaum, and my other committee members, Profs Siva Vaidhyanathan and Alex Galloway.

Although there is little direct guidance as to how spatial companies should deal with PIS data, there is a great deal of precedent with other types of personal data. As a result, spatial companies that collect, process or distribute PIS data should consider keeping current on federal and state laws that concern personal data. In addition, spatial companies that deal directly with consumers should consider developing a Spatial Data Security Program along the lines set out by the FTC for other types of personal data. Such a program may not only be required by the FTC, but it is also good business practice.

[via Pogo Was Right]

]]> http://michaelzimmer.org/2006/07/20/spatial-data-privacy-and-the-law/feed/ 0 http://michaelzimmer.org/2006/06/06/surveillance-privacy-and-the-ethics-of-vehicle-safety-communication-technologies/ http://michaelzimmer.org/2006/06/06/surveillance-privacy-and-the-ethics-of-vehicle-safety-communication-technologies/#comments Tue, 06 Jun 2006 13:52:57 +0000 Michael Zimmer http://michaelzimmer.org/2006/06/06/surveillance-privacy-and-the-ethics-of-vehicle-safety-communication-technologies/ For those readers interested in the intersections between privacy in public, locational privacy, contextual integrity, and vehicle technologies, my article “Surveillance, Privacy and the Ethics of Vehicle Safety Communication Technologies” has been published in the journal Ethics and Information Technology (you likely will need institutional access to view the article). Here is the abstract:

Recent advances in wireless technologies have led to the development of intelligent, in-vehicle safety applications designed to share information about the actions of nearby vehicles, potential road hazards, and ultimately predict dangerous scenarios or imminent collisions. These vehicle safety communication (VSC) technologies rely on the creation of autonomous, self-organizing, wireless communication networks connecting vehicles with roadside infrastructure and with each other. As the technical standards and communication protocols for VSC technologies are still being developed, certain ethical implications of these new information technologies emerge: Coupled with the predicted safety benefits of VSC applications is a potential rise in the ability to surveil a driver engaging in her everyday activities on the public roads. This paper will explore how the introduction of VSC technologies might disrupt the “contextual integrity” of personal information flows in the context of highway travel and threaten one’s “privacy in public.” Since VSC technologies and their related protocols and standards are still in the developmental stage, the paper will conclude by revealing how close attention to the ethical implications of the remaining design decisions can inform and guide designers of VSC technologies to create innovate safety applications that increase public safety, but without compromising the value of one’s privacy in public.

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