Geographical Information as ‘Personal Information’

Abstract

Maps have long been used to represent and display a wide variety of information. Placing information in a geographic context can give us new insights about social, political, environmental, demographic and other phenomena. Governments and businesses find value in placing information in a geographic context, and contemporary technology has greatly facilitated the combining and analysing of disparate sets of data. Web 2.0 and its associated tools and applications have also revolutionised the display and dissemination of such information by putting sophisticated tools in the hands of all manner of computer users. The demo cratisation of much government data has meant that there is a rich and everincreasing supply of information that may be represented in geographical terms. Information about every conceivable phenomenon from diseases to crime incidents can now be placed in a geographic context by government actors, private sector companies or individuals—and frequently by all three.1 The wide variety of data and the diversity of the publishers of data create significant challenges for data protection. Data protection laws typically govern the collection, use and disclosure of personal information. The focus of this paper is on the threshold question for the application of data protection laws: when does information placed in a geographical context become personal information? Understanding this threshold question is important because of the way in which geographic information systems develop. In many cases, the starting point for an application is anonymised or deidentified data. Yet geographic information is often a key element in identifying or re-identifying individual data subjects. For those who make data available and