Linking location privacy, digital sovereignty and location-based services: a meta review

Abstract

With the rapid growth of location-based services (LBS) in recent years, location privacy has also received increasing attention as very little (location) information about a person can facilitate deep inferences on very sensitive information. Despite this, many people freely share location information and seem unaware of potential consequences. LBS also provide few control options regarding how location information is shared. This limits the users’ sovereignty in managing their personal location information in several ways. In order to shed light onto how LBS, location privacy, and digital sovereignty are linked, this paper presents a meta-review of survey papers on location privacy. We derive a set of key concepts, summarise the current state of the art in location privacy research, and identify several research gaps in the field. We also found that there is a distinct lack of research regarding digital sovereignty with respect to the management of location information. In order to help address this issue, we derive a conceptual model that links key aspects of location privacy and location-based services that we identified in the meta-review to digital sovereignty. The model provides a systematic description of the essential interactions between these concepts. This can inform the evaluation and design of future LBS in research and practice.