Report from Dagstuhl: the liberation of mobile location data and its implications for privacy research

With the emergence of the mobile app ecosystem, user location data has escaped the grip of the tightly regulated telecommunication industry and is now being collected at unprecedented scale and accuracy by mobile advertising, platform, and app providers. This position paper is based on discussions of the authors at the Dagstuhl seminar on Mobility Data Mining and Privacy. It seeks to highlight this shift by providing a tutorial on location data flows and associated privacy risks in this mobile app ecosystem. Moreover, it reflects on the implications of this shift to the mobile privacy research community.