Where or Nowhere? Tracking Elusive Journalistic Guidelines for Ethical Use of Location Data

Abstract

Locative data is data that identifies a person’s precise location in a specific moment in time, allowing for evidence-based interpretations of who was doing what, when and where. Such tracking already happens regularly as a part of ubiquitous smartphone use. In journalistic contexts, with relative ease, this data can provide detailed documentation about events–connecting people, actions, and settings–in unprecedented thoroughness and complexity, even without informed consent. Locative data also can create significant threats to personal privacy, legal due process, and ethical norms along the way. To determine how journalists, conceptualize the emergence and power of locative data, this research turns to organizational codes of ethics, as representative of public discourse in the field. This content analysis explored such discourse in more than 50 major U.S. news organizations, including examinations of public policies and terms of service. This analysis shows that fewer than half of the largest U.S. news organizations even publicly share a code of ethics, conveying transparency and leadership issues throughout the field. The implications of this research also highlight the lack of clear policies and guidelines for how such data should be handled, protected, and ethically used by journalists.