Geospatial Data Security and Privacy
Geospatial Data Security and Privacy
Geospatial data are vital in a wide range of critical data management applications, including disaster and emergency management, environmental monitoring, land and city planning, and military operations, which frequently necessitate coordination among diverse organizations, data repositories, and users with varying responsibilities. Although there are numerous models and techniques for managing, accessing, and sharing geospatial data, very little attention has been paid to addressing security concerns, such as access control, security and privacy policies, and the development of secure, and particularly interoperable, GIS applications.
Recent advancements in location-enabled gadgets, sensors, and context-aware technologies, as well as the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), are driving this newfound interest. At an unprecedented rate, data created by various sensors and devices are being gathered, analyzed, and synthesized. While most of this data is utilized to develop products or services (for example, navigation systems), many people are uninformed of the information that is gathered, how it is obtained, and, more significantly, how it is used. The information derived from this personal data has aided important developments in computational and geospatial sciences, such as location recommendations and health services. Nevertheless, these advancements frequently come at a steep cost in terms of diminished location privacy.
In today’s digital world, it’s almost impossible to remove an individual’s footprint from the public sphere. The plethora of services that access an individual’s personal and location information is often hard to keep track of, meaning we often do not realize when our privacy has been violated. There are current technologies and techniques that are so new that we have no idea what to do with them. Younger generations perceive these technologies as a platform for social connection, automatically choosing to pay for a monetarily free program with personal data as currency. Due to a lack of awareness about the contribution of this location data, web applications and societal concerns such as the tracking of citizens by their governments have arisen. Yet, for the normal person who is not in this situation, location disclosure exposes them to aggressive marketing and location-based advertising. Most legal restrictions are far behind these techniques and technology, and policymakers are unable to keep up. Finally, improvements in artificial intelligence (e.g., tools such as neural networks) have shown promise in spatial domains such as autonomous cars, feature identification, and so on. These advancements, once again, come at a cost, often increasing the speed and simplicity with which individuals or organizations are identified.
