Privacy-aware geolocation interfaces for volunteered geography: a case study

Abstract

The standard W3C Geolocation API can significantly facilitate geospatial data collection as it provides a simple set of operations for requesting geolocation services across indoor and outdoor spaces through the Web. Importantly, this API is privacy-aware in that it provides a basic privacy mechanism for requesting the user's consent to location acquisition. In this paper we address the question on whether this privacy mechanism is sufficient to conduct a project for the collection of geospatial content, in compliance with privacy laws. The question is of practical relevance as the use of geolocation standards in line with privacy regulations would make the development of volunteered geography projects easier. In this paper we present an interdisciplinary analysis spanning across technology and law, and driven by an application case. We show the limitations of this API and discuss a possible extension in line with privacy norms. Although we confine ourselves to consider European regulations, we believe that this study can be of more general concern.