Abstract
Ethical considerations in the use of GPS-based movement tracking in health research - lessons from a care-seeking study in rural west India.
Highlights
Use of technology for movement tracking for health research in low and middle income countries invokes ethical challenges especially those related to privacy, confidentiality and risk of spatial re-identification
While conducting the care-seeking study, we found that the overall awareness regarding the nature of global positioning system (GPS) technology was low amongst the rural population
Accidental self-disclosure leading to breaches of locational privacy is a possibility: if participants are given access to Geospatial technologies (GSTs)-enabled smart phones with which they are unfamiliar, their incidental use of the devices may result in inadvertently revealing information about themselves
Summary
The primary concern in relation to the use of GPS is the amount of information that can be deduced from the person’s movements and how that information may be used [16]. Bearing in mind the privacy implications, only movement data for visiting health facilities from the care-seeking study were archived, avoiding archival of other movement data as agreed during the consent. Accidental self-disclosure leading to breaches of locational privacy is a possibility: if participants are given access to GST-enabled smart phones with which they are unfamiliar, their incidental use of the devices may result in inadvertently revealing information about themselves. In care-seeking study, first, the electronic data were anonymised to protect identity of an individual; second, geospatial coordinates of only health facilities were enabled avoiding revealing of other movement data. To some extent, published maps with masked confidential locations could be reengineered to reveal the exact location of an individual [22] Availability of this information in the public domain may increase the risk of identification for the participants. While this is especially pertinent for vulnerable populations, such as people living with HIV, protecting spatial confidentiality and participant identity should be a consideration for GST research in general
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