You are where you have been: the privacy implications of location and tracking technologies

A decade ago, technologies that could provide information about the location of a motor vehicle, or a computer, or a person, were in their infancy. A wide range of tools are now in use and in prospect, which threaten to strip away another layer of the limited protections that individuals enjoy.An understanding of the landscape of location and tracking technologies, and of the issues that they give rise to, depends on establishing a specialist language that enables meaningful and reasonably unambiguous discussion to take place.An outline of the familiar case of mobile phones, complemented by deeper assessments of road tolling and the surveillance of individual motor vehicles on the road, provides a basis for appreciation of the substantial threats that location technologies represent to free society