GeoData Policy

Central Platte NRD Sues USDA Over Information Access

 

By Robert Pore

Published: Tuesday, September 22, 2009 7:56 PM CDT

 

…The NRD is trying to gain access to the USDA’s geographic information system, or GIS, data to help it provide guidance on irrigation practices, mapping of cropland and district decisions. … The district decided to file a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain the information from the USDA in an effort to “bring the issue to a head,” Bishop said. “At one point, they indicated that we were going to get it, but then the new Farm Bill changed the language on the privacy deal, and now they say we can’t have it,” he said. …

Bishop said the information could be used to determine such practices as fertilizer and water use on private farmland that receives government farm benefits. For example, when it comes to the Central Platte NRD water quality program, having access to information about those growers who use nitrogen fertilizer would be helpful and cost effective.” …

Another example in which access to that USDA information would be helpful to the NRD is when the district had to certify all the irrigated acres in the Central Platte NRD. There are nearly 1 million acres of irrigated farmland in the district. The district had to certify all irrigated acres when the state mandated in 2004 a moratorium on all new irrigated acres and irrigation wells in districts that were deemed fully or overappropriated in their groundwater use. …  

But because the NRD was denied those records from the USDA, Bishop said, the district spent nearly two years at a cost of about $350,000.   ….

For full text of article, visit: http://www.theindependent.com/articles/2009/09/22/news/local/10658719.txt

For related posting on USDA GIS data access issues, visit the following link: http://geodatapolicy.wordpress.com/2008/10/24/farm-bill-restricts-access-to-clu-gis-data-part-iii/

There’s a new European Union funded project called MODAP on privacy and moving object data.

MODAP (Mobility, Data Mining, and Privacy) is a Coordination Action type project funded by EU, FET OPEN, 2009-2012).

With GPS enabled devices and other positioning systems, mobility behavior of individuals is captured for online or historical data analysis. For example, car insurance companies have started to issue policies with respect to the driving behavior which is captured through a GPS device installed under a special agreement. Such applications are enabled by mobility data mining which aims to extract knowledge from mobility data with a lot of opportunities as well as risks. The risks arise from the fact that mobility data is mostly about people, where they have been, at what times, how often, and with whom. Therefore, privacy is a major concern for mobility data which needs to be addressed before the opportunities of mobility data mining can be fully harvested. A recently completed EU project, GeoPKDD (Geographic Privacy-aware Knowledge Discovery and Delivery, www.geopkdd.eu) was the pioneer in this field. MODAP project, which started as of September 2009 with nearly one million euro funding for three years, aims to continue the efforts of GeoPKDD by coordinating and boosting the research activities in the intersection of mobility, data mining, and privacy. MODAP is a timely project since privacy risks associated with the mobility behavior of people are still unclear, and it is not possible for mobility data mining technology to thrive without sound privacy measures and standards for data collection, and data/knowledge publishing. For that reason, MODAP aims to create a platform for technical as well as non-technical people who are interested in mobility data mining together with privacy issues. The site www.modap.org will be the main platform for all types of community activities and will be functional as of October 15, 2009. http://www.modap.org/

Swiss privacy commissioner says “nein” to Google Street View

By Eric Bangeman | Last updated August 23, 2009, Ars Technica

…Just days after launching Street View in Portugal, Switzerland, and Taiwan, the search giant has been told by the Swiss Government that it needs to yank the Street View from its Swiss maps, a development that has left the search giant “surprised.” Hanspeter Thür, the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC), has accused Google of not having taken the necessary steps to safeguard the privacy of Swiss citizens. …

For full text of article, visit: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/08/swiss-privacy-commissioner-says-nein-to-google-street-view-swiss-privacy-commissioner-says-nein-to-google-street-view.ars

OGC Spatial Law and Policy Summit 2009

Posted  by GIS Talk on Sunday, August 09, 2009

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) announces that it will hold a Spatial Law and Policy Summit at The Westin Washington, D.C. City Center on October 7, 2009. Professionals from the government and private sector whose work involves laws and policies related to geospatial technology are invited to register and attend. This unprecedented event will feature talks and panel discussions by experts familiar with the wide range of legal and policy issues associated with growth in consumer and business applications of geospatial systems, software and services. The growing use of Earth browsers, satellite navigation devices in cars and PDA’s, location-based services associated with cell phones, business intelligence, social networking and satellite tracking of vehicles and equipment raises a number of issues concerning privacy, intellectual property rights, liability, and national security. As the speakers will explain, in many cases, the existing legal and policy framework is inadequate to provide governments, businesses and consumers clear guidance on these issues. The Summit will be chaired by OGC director and Executive Committee member Kevin Pomfret, a Richmond, Virginia based attorney who has written and spoken extensively on spatial law and technology.

To learn more, visit the OGC Spatial Law and Policy Summit website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/event/091007ets

On Locational Privacy, and How to Avoid Losing it Forever

By Andrew J. Blumberg and Peter Eckersley, August 2009

Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation

Over the next decade, systems which create and store digital records of people’s movements through public space will be woven inextricably into the fabric of everyday life. We are already starting to see such systems now, and there will be many more in the near future.

Here are some examples you might already have used or read about:

• Monthly transit swipe-cards
• Electronic tolling devices (FastTrak, EZpass, congestion pricing)
• Cellphones
• Services telling you when your friends are nearby
• Searches on your PDA for services and businesses near your current location
• Free Wi-Fi with ads for businesses near the network access point you’re using
• Electronic swipe cards for doors
• Parking meters you can call to add money to, and which send you a text message when your time is running out

These systems are marvellously innovative, and they promise benefits ranging from increased convenience to transformative new kinds of social interaction.

Unfortunately, these systems pose a dramatic threat to locational privacy.

For full text of the article, visit: http://www.eff.org/wp/locational-privacy 

Recent Directions All Points Blog post : 

On the Anonymity of Home/Work Location Pairs

Philippe Golle and Kurt Partridge, Palo Alto Research Center

Abstract. Many applications benefit from user location data, but location data raises privacy concerns. Anonymization can protect privacy, but identities can sometimes be inferred from supposedly anonymous data. This paper studies a new attack on the anonymity of location data. We show that if the approximate locations of an individual’s home and workplace can both be deduced from a location trace, then the median size of the individual’s anonymity set in the U.S. working population is 1, 21 and 34,980, for locations known at the granularity of a census block, census track and county respectively. The location data of people who live and work in different regions can be re-identied even more easily. Our results show that the threat of re-identication for location data is much greater when the individual’s home and work locations can both be deduced from the data. To preserve anonymity, we oer guidance for obfuscating location traces before they are disclosed. For PDF of the article, visit: http://crypto.stanford.edu/~pgolle/papers/commute.pdf 

 Patti Day passed along the following:

Wisconsin court upholds GPS tracking by police

By Ryan J Foley, May 07, 2009

MADISON, Wis. – Wisconsin police can attach GPS to cars to secretly track anybody’s movements without obtaining search warrants, an appeals court ruled Thursday. However, the District 4 Court of Appeals said it was “more than a little troubled” by that conclusion and asked Wisconsin lawmakers to regulate GPS use to protect against abuse by police and private individuals. As the law currently stands, the court said police can mount GPS on cars to track people without violating their constitutional rights – even if the drivers aren’t suspects.

Officers do not need to get warrants beforehand because GPS tracking does not involve a search or a seizure, Judge Paul Lundsten wrote for the unanimous three judge panel based in Madison. That means “police are seemingly free to secretly track anyone’s public movements with a GPS device,” he wrote. … The ruling came in a 2003 case involving Michael Sveum, a Madison man who was under investigation for stalking. Police got a warrant to put a GPS on his car and secretly attached it while the vehicle was parked in Sveum’s driveway. The device recorded his car’s movements for five weeks before police retrieved it and downloaded the information. …

For full text of the article, visit: http://archives.chicagotribune.com/2009/may/07/news/chi-ap-wi-gps-police

Implementing geographic information technologies ethically
ArcNews Online – Fall 2008
By Harlan J. Onsrud, Executive Director, Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association

As the globalization of geospatial information resources and services accelerates, it becomes far more challenging to protect personal information privacy; pursue traditional business or agency revenue generation models; protect property rights in spatial data products and services; ensure access to government data, records, and services; and provide security for our information systems. The traditional means of exerting control are often ill-suited to dealing with rapidly morphing technological and social conditions.

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Puneet Kishor, Ph.D. candidate in the Nelson Institue for Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, had the privilege of attending the Summer Doctoral Program (SDP) at Oxford University’s Oxford Internet Institute this past summer. Following is a brief report from his experience.

Puneet wrote: The theme of the two week long workshop was “Web Science,” a term coined to describe the emerging “science of the web.” The logic is that “in order to: understand what the web is; engineer its future; ensure its social benefit, we need a new interdisciplinary field that (we) call Web Science.” [http://webscience.org].

Among the several program tutors, the notable personalities (for me) were Hal Abelson (co-founder of Creative Commons), Gerry Sussman (co-founder of Free Software Foundation) and Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the web).

The presentations could be broadly aggregated under the themes of social networking and Second Life; semantic web; and privacy and security. There was an all too brief digression into matters of public policy, and I was the only participant from the geospatial arena. Most of the presentations can be accessed from [http://students.oii.ox.ac.uk/sdp:sdp2008:readings].

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