Decentralized geoprivacy: leveraging social trust on the distributed web

• Published in: International journal of geographical information science : IJGIS 2021-12, Vol.35 (12), p.2540-2566
• Main Authors: Hojati, Majid, Farmer, Carson, Feick, Rob, Robertson, Colin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: decentralized geoprivacy; discrete global grid systems; distributed spatial data sharing; Socio-spatial networks
• ISSN: 1365-8816; 1362-3087
• DOI: 10.1080/13658816.2021.1931236

Despite several high-profile data breaches and business models that commercialize user data, participation in social media networks continues to require users to trust corporations to safeguard their personal data. Since these data increasingly contain geographic references that allude to individuals' locations and movements, the need for new approaches to geoprivacy and data sovereignty has grown. We develop a geoprivacy framework that couples two emerging technologies - decentralized data storage and discrete global grid systems - to facilitate fine-grained user control over the ownership of, access to and map-based representation of their data. The framework is illustrated with a dynamic k-anonymity model that links the geographic precision of shared data to social trust within in a social network. In this framework, users' spatio-temporal data are shared through a decentralized system and are represented on a discrete global grid data model at spatial resolutions that correspond to varying degrees of trust between individuals who are exchanging information. Our framework has several advantages over centralized geoprivacy approaches, namely trust in a third-party entity is not required and geoprivacy is dynamic and context-dependent with users maintaining autonomy. As the distributed web begins to emerge, so too can the next generation of geographic information sharing tools.