Facebook recently launched its Places feature, which allows you (or your friends) to post your current location, in about the same way Foursquare does. It’s cool and trendy, what could possibly go wrong ? Well, aside from this obvious and somewhat manageable possibility, the omnipresence of locating technologies and ever more powerful software to analyse data may pass the tipping point where any expectation of privacy ceases to be reasonable.

That’s the idea put forth by Ted Claypoole in an interview by Nymity: “Geo-location privacy is based on the concept that everyone has a right to be anonymous in their location at some points in their life. […] Many of our most basic human rights are grounded in privacy and anonymity.” For instance, for freedom of assembly “to be effective, a person must be able to meet with others in private, avoiding tracking and surveillance.”

The subject is topical. It could not be addressed 200 years ago by the framers of the United States Constitution, for it was quite easy to achieve anonymity. With the recent opening of the GPS system to civilian applications and its integration in cars and cellphones, the paradigm is shifted. In fact, the trend is so powerful that “If we do not start asking questions now about rights to privacy in location, technology may make those questions moot.”

On an positive note, however, Claypoole note that while it may be too late in the United States to recognize location privacy as a basic human right, Canada and European Union have already done so.

The issue of geo-location was also the object of a New York Times article titled “Judges Divided Over Rising GPS Surveillance“. The core of the divide is explained by the necessary shift courts must make regarding privacy:

“Some legal scholars say the escalating use of such high-tech techniques for enhancing traditional police activities is eroding the pragmatic considerations that used to limit how far a law-enforcement official could intrude on people’s privacy without court oversight. They have called for a fundamental rethinking of how to apply Fourth Amendment privacy rights in the 21st century.”

Accompanying any shift of this sort is a period of uncertainty: the US Court of Appeal recently “overturned a drug trafficking conviction because the evidence against the defendant included tracking data from a GPS receiver that the police hid under his sport utility vehicle without a warrant”, noting the fundamental differences between tracking someone 24/7 at almost no cost and classic surveillance in public areas. Judge Richard Posner, however, argued to the contrary: “The Fourth Amendment “cannot sensibly be read to mean that police shall be no more efficient in the 21st century than they were in the 18th”.

Posted from Ledjit’s office, located 550 Sherbrooke West, Montreal (45.505678N, 73.571592W or so).

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