Human movement data and the future of privacy
It was recently published by RNZ that Spark is holding customers’ geographic location data for seven years, far more than the average telco. The article investigated that although Spark holds their location data for seven years, Vodafone NZ stores their data for 14 months, 2 Degrees withheld sharing this information, and the average United States telco holds their data for two years. The article also brings up an interesting fact that there are no rules in New Zealand that states how long geographic data can be stored, but the Privacy Act 2020 could be applied if a person was identifiable from the data.
It’s a common conversation of wondering how much data is being captured through our smartphones, if we’re being tracked, and for what purpose. When you select “turn on location services” on your smartphone, it’s assumed that this data is being collected and stored. But what isn’t transparent for the everyday user, is how long this data is stored and what for? We live in good faith that our telco service providers keep our location data secure, but that isn’t always the case for other applications that ask for our location data. Majority of the time, this data can be sold to a third party, and often for the purposes of advertising.
As we carry our smartphones almost everywhere we go, they not only store a digital record of many of our online interactions, but they also create a literal map of our lives. Once you store enough geographic data from one person, it’s easy to predict their next steps or determine how a person lives their lives. This 2019 New York Times Privacy Project article series ‘One Nation, Tracked: An investigation into the smartphone tracking industry from time opinion’ gives a thorough breakdown of how this technology has been utilised. The first article ‘Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy’ sets the scene of how one dataset can accurately pinpoint a person's movement and raises concerns for privacy and its potential if placed in the wrong hands.
Collecting location data can be seen as a double edge sword - it provides so many insights across a range of industries. Progress is being made to further protect people’s data with the Ministry of Justice recently publishing its proposal to strengthen the transparency of the indirect collection of personal information under the Privacy Act 2020 and aligning it to the European Union Adequacy Status. For more information, you can find the proactive release from the Ministry of Justice here. However, it’s up to our industry to ensure that we hold higher standards for security and transparency to what is being collected, what it’s being used for, and how long it’s stored.