Resisting geosurveillance: A survey of tactics and strategies for spatial privacy

Abstract

Geosurveillance is continually intensifying, as techniques are developed to siphon ever-increasing amounts of data about individuals. Here we survey three tactics and three strategies for resistance in an attempt to provoke greater discussion about resistance to geosurveillance. Tactics explored include data minimization, obfuscation, and manipulation. Strategies for resisting geosurveillance build upon other forms of resistance and include examination of the assumptions of geosurveillance, investigating privacy-focused software alternatives, and strengthening the ability of activists to operate in this sphere. Individually, each of these are unlikely to effect great change; used in concert, they have the potential to guide technological development in such a way that it is less likely to serve corporate and government interests and more likely to protect individual and group privacy.

Decentralized geoprivacy: leveraging social trust on the distributed web

“…Information about people's location is very different from other types of data that can be collected from online SSNs. Geographic data, whether explicit coordinates or less precise place-or activity-based references, allow SSN content to be linked to the spatio-temporal context it was produced within as well as to ancillary data external to the online SSN (Swanlund and Schuurman 2019). According to Duckham and Kulik (2006, pg. 3) geoprivacy is defined as a special type of information privacy which concerns the claim of individuals to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent location information about them is communicated to others.…”

“…Second, and more fundamentally, online SSN providers must return control of personal data to their platform users to truly limit data repurposing and to reduce the impact and scope of data breaches. We contend that the majority of geoprivacy research in the GIScience community has centred on the first issue and the tangible actions that individuals or responsible agencies can take to protect personal geoprivacy (Andrienko et al 2016, Clarke 2016, Zhao and Sui 2017, Swanlund and Schuurman 2019. Examples include work by Kounadi and Resch (2018) who provide guidelines for sharing geographic data and preserving geoprivacy or Kounadi and Leitner (2014) who identify research papers that display confidential information as a way to draw attention to geoprivacy in academic research.…”

Digital geographies, feminist relationality, Black and queer code studies: Thriving otherwise

“…Some scholars point to feminist speculative epistemologies as opening possibilities for emancipatory digital politics, and argue for reading spatial big data analytics as possible sites of radical politics (Burns et al, 2017; Thatcher, 2019; Burns and Andrucki, 2019). Others have illustrated possibilities for ‘hacking’ the supposed hegemony of digital mediation through digital tactics of revelation and ridicule (Kingsbury and Jones, 2009), collective sousveillance (surveilling back) (Zook and Graham, 2018), intentional mis-information, opt-out and collective construction of alternative digital infrastructures (Swanlund and Schuurman, 2018).…”

The ontology of resistance: Power, tactics and making do in the Vila Rubim market

“…Such a conceptualisation of resistance starts with problematising dominant interpretations of Foucault's (1978) analysis of power and resistance, which assume the existence of a merely coercive power and treat resistance as a mere reaction to it. Such an approach to power and resistance has shaped our understanding of conflict in urban space: see, for example, Ju and Tang (2010) on grassroots environmental groups against the South Korea government, Lauermann and Vogelpohl (2019) on protest campaigns against the organisation of megaevents in Boston and Hamburg, Davies and Blanco (2017) on contentious anti-austerity politics, Pearsall (2013) on anti-gentrification struggles in New York, or work describing different modes of resistance to surveillance (Gromme´, 2016;Swanlund and Schuurman, 2019). Although this work is important and, indeed, necessary for understanding and visualising oppositional politics, it has also been problematised because it 'draws a strict contrast between the diabolic world of power and the liberating world of resistance' (Fleming and Spicer, 2008: 304).…”