PrivacyConsumers Consider Third-Party Use of Personal Location Data as Privacy Violations

Published 11 August 2020

The National Security Agency issued a warning to its employees 4 August that cellphone location data could pose a national security risk. But how do consumers feel about their location data being tracked and sold? New research yielded surprising results.

The National Security Agency issued a warning to its employees 4 August that cellphone location data could pose a national security risk.

The data, which is collected and sold for advertising and marketing purposes, “can reveal details about the number of users in a location, user and supply movements, daily routines and can expose otherwise unknown associations between users and locations,” according to the warning.

But how do consumers feel about their location data being tracked and sold? New research from the University of Notre Dame yielded surprising results.

“What is it about location?” published in the July issue of the Berkeley Technology Law Journal by Kirsten Martin, the William P. and Hazel B. White Center Professor of Technology Ethics at Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, and Helen Nissenbaum from Cornell Tech, showed that people are nuanced about how their location is tracked. They don’t appreciate it if, say, their location data is used to identify if they are voting or attending a protest, but approve if location data is used by a family member to figure out if they are home. Also, overwhelmingly, people are not comfortable with third-party location data brokers, or data aggregators, collecting for any reason.

Notre Dame notes that it’s common knowledge that tech companies mine users’ personal information. Apps often collect and share location data with aggregators, who then sell it to corporate and government customers. Privacy issues involving TikTok, Facebook and others have repeatedly been documented in national news stories. Martin said, in her study, respondents were OK with some aspects of location data collection, and not OK with others.

“They didn’t seem to mind as much if employers collecting their data could identify if they were at work, but they did mind if their employer figured out they frequented a liquor store or attended a protest,” said Martin, a nationally recognized expert in privacy, technology and corporate responsibility at Notre Dame’s Technology Ethics Center. “However, they did not like data aggregators collecting their data. They consistently rated the collection of location data by aggregators for any reason as not OK — and by a large margin.”