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Curated Track: AAG's GeoEthics Initiative and Related Effort , Legal Geography Specialty Group Curated Track

Description:

It has been more than four years since the landmark US Supreme Court case Carpenter v. United States was decided and it became illegal for police to access a private person's cell phone location data without a warrant. This decision not only represented an acknowledgement of the technological capacity for "near-perfect surveillance," but also the importance of safeguarding spatial data in particular. A few short years later, the US Census Bureau faced legal challenges based on its decision to use a controversial "differential privacy" algorithm on its 2020 enumeration data, of which many, from demographers and geographers to laypeople, were already suspicious. The Census disclosure avoidance algorithm, dubbed TopDown Algorithm or TDA, introduces intentional errors into the data in an attempt to stop those without proper clearance from reverse engineering private and identifiable data. Citing the use of census data in everything from electoral redistricting to distribution of federal and state dollars, the Alabama state government filed a motion, which was ultimately denied, requesting the Alabama Supreme Court stop the Census Bureau from using the TDA.

Even existing laws, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, which has been law since 1996, do not necessarily safeguard against deriving location from data such as a de-identified health information that can be scraped or purchased from any number of sources. For example, Copley Advertising, a digital marketing company in Massachusetts, was hired in 2015 to use geofencing to text anti-abortion messages to women who entered with a certain distance of clinics where abortion services are provided. The Attorney General for the state reached a settlement with Copley to stop them from using their geofences in Columbus, New York City, Pittsburgh, Richmond, and St. Louis, but not until 2017. The delay was likely due in part to the difficulty in determining jurisdiction when the company is based in Massachusetts but was operating in five other states.

Despite best efforts, from appeals to legal authorities to letter campaigns from world-renowned demographers, laws and policies have not been able to keep up with technological innovation that renders privacy a luxury. Taking these cases and recent events in context together, it is clear that new attention is being paid to what geographers have always said is most important: location, location, location. What then is the proper role of the state in regulating these concerns about privacy, confidentiality, and identifiability of data? Who are the responsible parties? Consumers? Tech companies? Government entities? And can these controversial techniques be used for purposes beyond capitalist accumulation or the policing of who can be where and when?

To begin to unpack these questions, our panel will dissect this complex interplay between law, geography, and health at the nexus of data science, surveillance, and privacy.

Non-Presenting Participants