13 Principles Week of Action: Location Privacy is a Human Right

September 16, 2014 - by Hanni Fakhoury.

By its very nature, our location is unique and uniquely revealing. Knowledge of where a person is and has been can reveal affiliations and habits, customs and patterns, religious affiliations, politics and preferences. While social media allows people to voluntarily share their location information with others, no one reveals all their location information all the time to others – especially not to the government. Technological developments have enabled governments to keep tabs on where a person has been in the past and where they are at any given moment. Our laws, however, have struggled to keep track with this new power.