Challenges to Locational Privacy: The Transformation of Urban Mobility

Pervasive, always-on wireless networks increasingly surround citizens. These systems bridge physical spaces and the virtual world to deliver greater efficiencies in urban mobility. Efforts to develop transportation and mobility infrastructure are subjecting populations to the influence of technologies that monitor individuals and group movements within our communities—and to determine interactions, associations and transactions at an increasingly finer degree of granularity. A concern is whether existing assessments of established technologies and their human rights impacts are apt to be applied to these novel technological innovations relating to mobility data: does the degree of originality these new advancements represent indeed require that we adopt a fundamentally different approach to their appraisal? Locational privacy constitutes a specific facet of privacy and has recently acquired prominence in discussions regarding urban mobility stemming from developments in ICT. As citizens, our own individual movements are aiding the development of more granular, sophisticated registers of activities linked to our mobility through the collection and processing of personal data. Crucially, there has been little examination to date, especially within Europe, as to why locational privacy is especially relevant to the safeguard of the right to privacy in urban settings.