Ethics Argument
Ethical Implications of Location Data Collection Without Informed Consent
The expansion of mobile technology and internet-connected devices has radically reshaped how people interact with digital services. Smartphones, wearables, home devices, and the Internet of Things (IoT) have established an extremely interconnected system wherein data circulates freely at all times. The mass collection and utilization of location data allows for accurate information for a user’s location, usually recorded on a continuous and contemporaneous basis. Location data has moved from just coordinates to comprehensive patterns of travel, visited spots, and contextual data that can expose extremely intimate details of an individual’s life. From navigation tools like Google Maps and Waze, which give commuters up-to-date traffic information and automatically reroute to avoid congestion, to location-targeted advertisement systems offering hyper-local deals and offers to shoppers’ phones, location data has become an anchor of today’s digital economy. For instance, a retailer like Starbucks can push a coupon on a consumer’s phone when a consumer walks by a café, triggering impromptu purchases. Location data also enables essential public services such as emergency first responders’ locating someone in need, urban planners’ measurement of pedestrian movement to enhance infrastructure, and public health professionals monitoring and controlling disease outbreaks, as exemplified by the COVID-19 pandemic via contact tracing efforts.
While these benefits accrue, rapid expansion of location data collection has outrun public comprehension and regulation, and considerable ethical difficulties have ensued. Many users are still unsure of just how extensively their geographical data is collected, shared, and traded by firms and third parties. This was dramatically highlighted in a 2018 expose by The New York Times, which revealed hundreds of seemingly innocuous smartphone applications—ranging from weather applications to flashlight applications—continued to share users’ accurate location data with third-party brokers without users’ explicit or informed permission (Valentino-Devries et al., 2018). This expose highlighted the undisclosed nature of the location data marketplace, wherein data brokers compile, examine, and resell comprehensive location histories, often unbeknown to and without approval from users. Such actions create fundamental ethical questions regarding openness, autonomy, and privacy. In addition, consent is often secured via long and intricate Terms of Service agreements most users never read and can’t fully grasp, making consent uninformed and not truly voluntary. Location tracking is often enabled by default, and users must explicitly opt out, if they’re aware of it. All these create a huge imbalance of power between technology firms and users and result in people unwittingly surrendering control of very intimate personal data. This paper discusses the ethical effects of location data collection without informed consent. It contends that while location services bring undeniable benefits, current practices undermine basic user autonomy, privacy, and openness principles. Utilitarianism, deontology, and care ethics are applied to examine these moral problems and outline directions for more ethical and justifiably governed data.
Location data is digital data that determines where an individual and/or a device is located in physical space. It can be extremely specific—pinning down exact latitude and longitude coordinates through a system of satellites, such as GPS or inferred based on triangulation technology leveraging Wi-Fi infrastructures, cell towers, Bluetooth beacons, or IPs (Valentino-DeVries, Singer, Keller, & Krolik, 2018). GPS uses satellite signals to determine exact location, utilized within smartphone applications and navigation systems. Wi-Fi and cell triangulation approximate location based on nearby routers’ signal strength, and short-range transmitting Bluetooth beacons are utilized within closed spaces like shopping malls, arenas, and airports to identify and track surrounding devices. These technologies are integrated into myriad applications and systems, some of which gather location data in real time and record it for later analysis. The privacy issue with location data is not just its precision, but also its persistence and ability to reveal deeply personal patterns. Ongoing tracking can indicate a person’s daily routine, residence and workplace addresses, religious belief through attendance at religious establishments, health status through visits to health facilities, and even politics based on participation at demonstrations or rallies. The intensely revealing quality of location data raises the stakes on privacy and ethics with regard to gathering and using it.
While these applications yield concrete benefits, they also raise significant questions regarding surveillance, profiling, and data exploitation. The original intent of collection is often lost once data moves through a large and ill-regulated environment. Data can be obtained by an app installed by an individual for some other, unrelated purpose and it can be shared or sold to third parties, such as advertisers, analytics firms, and data brokers. These brokers combine millions of personal records to create rich profiles for sale to advertisers, law enforcement groups, political campaigns, or other commercial buyers (NPR, 2021). Few users know their location data can find its way into such a marketplace, much less how it can be used to manipulate their behavior, target them on a socioeconomic basis, or expose them to discriminatory treatment. Legally, most firms try to justify their data activities by referring to user consent from Terms of Service agreements and privacy policies. These documents are frequently couched in complicated legalese nobody reads, much less understands. According to a study from Pew Research Center, a clear majority of Americans perceive themselves to have minimal control of their personal data and are less than fully familiar with how it’s being accessed and utilized (Pew Research Center, 2019). Consent is frequently packaged together with other permissions so it’s impossible to discern exactly what data is being harvested, by whom, and for how it’s going to get used. Location monitoring is often enabled by its default setting, and users must go out of their way and take explicit steps to deactivate it which is a process perhaps too difficult and hidden for less tech-savvy users.
While some legislative systems have tried to fill these gaps, wide enforcement loopholes persist. Both the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) have moved ahead to require more explicit disclosures, access rights for data, and opt-outs. Yet, international enforcement varies and many jurisdictions have no similar protections (Federal Trade Commission, 2022). Even when robust laws are in place, corporate compliance can be superficial, and punishment for offenses might lack bite to discourage unethical behavior. This activity engenders an inherent imbalance of power among technology firms and users, eroding autonomy and trust. Without greater ethical controls and stronger regulatory protocols, exploitation of location data will continue, jeopardizing users’ interests while benefiting firms amid a largely hidden and unaccountable data marketplace. An extensive ethical evaluation of location data collection without explicit consent demands an understanding of the views, interests, and worries of the most significant stakeholders. These stakeholders are technology firms, advertisers, privacy activists, average users, and regulatory agencies. All these groups are indispensable for developing the terms of trade for the location data economy and have varying effects from such collection and utilization.
In terms of its participation in the data economy, technology firms and app developers are key players and frequently act on both data collection and data intermediary roles. From their own perspective, location data increases user engagement, enables app functionality, and fuels innovation—arguments supporting a utilitarian perspective on ethics. Firms like Google and Apple incorporate location services into operating systems and provide commonly utilized applications like Google Maps, Find My iPhone, and Apple Maps, which rely on real-time geolocation (Mobile Marketing Association, 2021). These applications enhance guidance, make users safer, and are convenient. To enable such applications, the same data also powers personalized ads and profiling based on behavior. Google, for instance, utilizes location history for customized search results and delivering geographically relevant advertisements which in return gives a rise to considerable advertisement revenue. Although some firms invest money into privacy-improving technologies like differential privacy and on-device processing, others invest in intrusive data collection practices with low disclosure, tucking essential details into such complicated terms and conditions.
This tension also exposes a broader normative conflict between user respect and profit maximization. Developers may defend data collection on grounds of service quality, but too often they push too hard, collecting excessive amounts of data and storing it for too long. Particularly egregious are applications that persist even after users have withdrawn consent, illustrated by legal actions against applications that subvert operating system controls (Valentino-DeVries et al., 2018). User autonomy is undermined by a lack of adequate transparency and raises questions whether firms can manage their conflicting roles as service providers and data profiteers. Advertisers and marketers constitute another influential stakeholder group. Such organizations depend on accurate, timely location data to present personalized, contextually appropriate advertisements. By drawing on users’ physical presence at firms’ locations or certain events, marketers can generate improved engagement and conversion rates with a consequentialist rationality aimed at achieving efficiency and financial gains. A fast-food restaurant can send a coupon to a user walking by at lunchtime or an apparel shop can inform proximal customers of an impromptu sale. Such techniques are particularly beneficial for small and local enterprises looking to vie against large retailers (Mobile Marketing Association, 2021).
While the financial benefit is obvious, the ethical stakes are enormous. Hyper-targeted marketing can quickly slide from persuasion to manipulation when customers are oblivious to their behavior being monitored and traded. Further, advertisers’ need for such detailed location data has created an opaque system of data brokering whose effects are to embed yet another form of pervasive monitoring without obvious accountability. By facilitating and paying for widespread collection, advertisers fuel a culture of commodified privacy, subordinating users’ rights to commercial interest. Human rights groups and privacy advocates embrace a rights-centric, deontologically based normative standpoint. They contend that human beings have inherent privacy and autonomy rights which need to be respected irrespective of material benefits. Groups like Electronic Frontier Foundation (2020) stress that non-consensual collection of data infringes these rights and provides rich soil for abuses such as mass government monitoring, commercial discrimination, and political manipulation. High-profile instances like collection of geolocation data for monitoring protestors anywhere in the U.S. or for monitoring seekers of reproductive healthcare highlight how acute these issues are.
Comprehensive reform, with strong consent systems, transparency requirements, and data minimalization, is advocated for by some. Decentralized data models and privacy-by-design systems, which empower users with control and agency, are also advocated for. According to this perspective, moral obligation is no longer about maximizing utility but ensuring human dignity, informed decision, and social justice, especially for already-minoritized groups. General users are arguably most impacted and least enabled stakeholders. Few have digital literacy sufficient to grasp fully how location tracking operates, what is harvested and how, and how it is utilized. The great majority of users consent to terms and privacy agreements without reading them, usually out of necessity to access necessary services (Pew Research Center, 2019). This translates into an illusory form of consent, whereby persons are presented with a take-it-or-leave-it situation that does not meet ethical requirements for voluntary, informed consent. Furthermore, refusing data sharing can entail decreased functionality or exclusion from app utilization—putting an unfair onus on users to make a choice between privacy and convenience.
This imbalance is particularly acute for marginalized populations. There is evidence to indicate low-income groups, racial minorities, and undocumented groups are disproportionately subject to targeting for security measures such as location monitoring. For instance, location data has been utilized to monitor immigration enforcement zones or to target groups on the basis of meetings at religious sites or community health centers (NPR, 2021). According to the care perspective, these damages are neither technical offenses nor just whatsoever; a violation of relations that subverts trust and confidence among users and service providers. Emotional trauma, anxiety of exposure, and diminishing faith in technology have long-term personal and social effects. Regulators and government agencies act as mediators between public protection and innovation. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and their global counterparts are progressively dedicated to mitigating the damages of unregulated data practices. Although policies like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) within the European Union and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) within the United States are significant advancements, regulation has tended to lack consistency, and most firms find means to circumvent regulation by exploiting loopholes within laws or cosmetic alterations to policies (Federal Trade Commission, 2022).
Nonetheless, public outcry and reporting have forced lawmakers to act. Recent developments involve FTC suits against data brokers reselling location data without consent, and new bills introduced to prohibit sales of such sensitive location data altogether. These regulation efforts indicate an increasingly widespread recognition that lapses of ethics on location-tracking cannot continue depending on market forces alone. Policymakers need to balance economic gains against democratic values of privacy, fairness, and agency when developing suitable protections. The ethical critique of gathering location data without consent is enhanced by drawing on several philosophical doctrines. These are utilitarianism, deontology, care ethics, virtue ethics, and social contract theory. Each provides a different set of lenses with which to assess the morality of non-consensual data collection and shed light on its repercussions and inherent principles at stake.
Utilitarianism and consequentialism assess actions on a basis of their consequence, attempting to maximize overall happiness, or utility. Supporters of data collection claim the practice has significant social and economic benefits. Location data improves navigation applications, aids public health efforts (such as COVID-19 contact tracing), and fuels business development with location marketing (Mobile Marketing Association, 2021). For example, pandemic mobility data helped identify hotspots and inform public health policies. These desirable effects are applied to justify broad data collection as being for the greater good. Nevertheless, a utilitarian framework also calls for a comparison of harm to individuals against benefits. Unauthorized collection and monetization of location data have resulted in severe privacy invasions like monitoring without consent, and often without explicit disclosure, of users’ home addresses, places of worship, and health clinics visited. During a 2018 investigation by The New York Times, applications were collecting and sharing extremely accurate location data that could pinpoint users’ home locations, places of worship, and health clinics visited—often with no explicit disclosure (Valentino-DeVries et al., 2018). Harming these users—losing privacy, exposure to profiling, and emotional distress—call into question whether aggregate benefit can outweigh personal cost. A truly utilitarian course of action must factor in long-term eroding trust, chilling effect on free movement and expression, and disparate harm to vulnerable populations.
Deontology, also referred to as rights-oriented ethics, asserts that users have inalienable rights, such as privacy, autonomy, and informed consent, whose violation is out of the question irrespective of consequences. It is ethically wrong to regard users only as means to an economic or utilitarian end. Harvesting location data without their explicit, informed, and voluntary consent disrespects the Kantian ethos of treating each human being as an autonomous agent with responsibilities and rights (Nissenbaum, 2010). Even if it leads to socially beneficial services, lack of explicit consent taints such activities with an ethical illegitimacy. An example of this is law enforcement agency access to geolocation data without a check by the judiciary. In some instances, U.S. police have bought location data from third-party brokers to carry out “geo-fence” searches or place people in a specific area at a specific time on a list of suspects without warrants and without notifying users (Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2020). Such actions violate the professional obligation to protect legal rights and safeguards, and raise alarm about surveillance excess and disempowering constitutional protections.
The ethic of care moves the locus from abstract rules to relationships, context, and vulnerability. It prioritizes the ethical significance of care, responsibility, and attentiveness within and among relationships. According to this view, location data practices need to take into account how they affect trust, particularly among service providers and users. Forcing users to be tracked undermines such trust and betrays relational duties owed by firms to users depending on their platforms. Ethics of care is especially applicable when determining harm to already marginalized populations. For instance, data obtained from health and LGBTQ+ targeting applications can be utilized to derive sensitive data, putting users at greater risk within areas with intolerant social or political environments. The Roe v. Wade climate of 2022 in America once again raised fears regarding location data being used to monitor persons seeking access to abortions, with privacy advocates sounding alarm bells regarding reproductive health clinic visits being monitored and divulged to law enforcement or anti-abortion groups (NPR, 2021). In such scenarios, care ethics entails safeguarding such vulnerable populations by refraining from exploiting and weaponizing their data.
Virtue ethics questions not what is right to do, but what sort of character it manifests. This framework criticizes firms whose data practices are secretive or exploitative as being deficient in virtues like honesty, integrity, and regard for others. A company silently gathering and marketing user data without genuine consent indicates lack of trustworthiness and fairness virtues. Companies emphasizing open communication, user agency, and privacy defense, on the other hand, exemplify responsible stewardship. Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature, where it forces applications to seek users’ permission before monitoring them, is an attempt to bring corporate actions into alignment with ethical character—albeit it incurs friction from advertisers (Federal Trade Commission, 2022).
Social contract theory holds that society operates on shared agreements that uphold rights and communal values. In the online world, users have an anticipated standard of privacy, autonomy, and respect for being a participant within digital ecosystems. Companies’ violation of this tacit contract—collecting and reselling location data without consent—destabilizes social trust justifying their existence. Ethical behavior from a social contract perspective requires abiding by shared norms and openness regarding practices impacting the public. As users continue to become aware of surveillance practices, firms disregarding these changing standards risk reputational loss, regulatory actions, and consumer protest. Briefly, using several ethical theories proves that it is not just problematic in practice to gather location data without informed consent, but also inherently wrong on principle. Whether it is judged on its ill effects, rights violation, disregard for care, lack of virtuous behavior, or violation of social trust, non-consensual geolocation monitoring falls short of standards for ethical data governance.
Some supporters of large-scale collection of location data assert that users derive considerable benefits from free services and improved user experiences, and this justifies data collection—without explicit permission. They also argue that by downloading and utilizing these services voluntarily, users implicitly agree to data collection as a condition of convenience and personalization. Others say anonymization and aggregating location data sufficiently guards against privacy worries. Finally, opponents of stronger regulation say overly strict privacy legislation can hamper innovation and technological advancement, especially for start-ups and small firms based on data-driven insights to compete. Such arguments are, however, ethically deficient when tested against informed consent standards. To begin with, the idea of implied consent from service use overlooks the stipulation that consent needs to be informed, voluntary, and explicit and not coerced or passive. Numerous users lack adequate comprehension of the scope or implication of location monitoring built into applications, particularly when permission is solicited within long, technical Terms of Service documents (Pew Research Center, 2019). In addition, users are often presented with a “take-it-or-leave-it” situation: declining permission commonly results in disqualifying users from basic services, which can hardly be said to constitute free decision. This repeated arguments have been made against the assertion anonymized data is private based on findings demonstrating how location data can be identified by aggregating datasets or from movement patterns (Valentino-Devries et al., 2018). This susceptibility leads to anonymized location data being potentially dangerous for exposing persons to stalking, profiling, or discrimination, and invalidating privacy assurances.
Although innovation is an essential social value, it must neither sacrifice ethical standards nor basic rights. There are privacy-sustaining technologies like differential privacy, federated learning, and advanced encryption, illustrating how privacy and innovation can occur together (Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2020). Promoting ethical data governance models encourages trust, and trust ultimately benefits users and also firms. Therefore, arguments for non-consensual collection of location data cannot trump the ethical demands for informed, open consent. Gathering location data without explicit, informed consent is ethically unacceptable. Although location-based services undoubtedly provide substantial benefits—such as enhanced navigation, personalized marketing, social connection, and public health—their benefits should not come at the cost of basic human rights like privacy, autonomy, and dignity. The opaque, bundled, and coercive consent models prevalent today do not uphold these rights and dissolve the trust users have for digital platforms.
Ethical data practices involve shifting away from current siloed and fragmented systems and toward higher levels of transparency, communication clarity, and user control. This means developing systems that secure explicit, fine-grained consent, make clear and simple disclosures of data, and bake privacy into technology from an early stage based on privacy by design principles. Companies also need to give users meaningful control of their location data, such as rights to access, rectify, and erase personal data. All these steps defend privacy and create a healthier, trustworthy digital world. Policymakers, industry actors, and civil society need to join forces to create and implement strong standards of regulation for these values globally and fill gaps and inconsistencies within current systems. Educating users and giving them control of their data will restore agency and bolster social trust in digital technologies. It is only by putting human dignity and consent at their core that society can fully achieve benefits from location-based services while insulating individuals from detriment from surveillance and exploitation in today’s digital world.
References
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