GeoPrivacy: Privacy in Geographic Information Collection and Analysis

Developments in mobile and surveying technologies over the past decade have enabled the collection of individual-level and aggregated geographic information at unprecedented scale. These data are valuable sources for answering scientific questions about human behavior and improving related services, from public transportation to location-aware recommendations. However, privacy intrusion is an imminent risk when individual trajectories (and in some cases aggregated travel patterns) are used for commercial purposes such as customer profiling, or even for political persecution. Similarly, there is a trade-off between location privacy and quality of spatial search and recommender systems. The GeoPrivacy workshop will hence focus on discussing methods to protect individuals’ privacy while enabling collection, analysis, and sharing of useful geographic information.