Location-based services (LBS) are services that position a person’s mobile phone to provide some context-based service. Some of these services – called ‘location tracking’ or ‘push LBS’ applications - need frequent updates of the current position to decide whether a service should be initiated at the current moment — or to deduct from a location profile a future point in time for service provision. Thus, such distributed and ubiquitous systems will continuously collect and process locations in relationship to a personal context of an identified customer, combining personal information with other data streams (e.g., weather data or financial information). This chapter will introduce the concept of location as part of a person’s identity. The role of location profiles in information systems is developed and related to identity management, privacy and geographical information systems (GIS). Furthermore, this contribution will outline how the knowledge about a person’s private life and identity can be enhanced with data mining technologies on location profiles and movement patterns.
Finally, some preventive measures such as temporal and spatial cloaking, MIX-zoning and location dummies for protecting location information from unwanted profiling are explained.
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Fritsch, L. (2008). Profiling and Location-Based Services (LBS). In: Hildebrandt, M., Gutwirth, S. (eds) Profiling the European Citizen. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6914-7_8
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