If you’re reading this blog, there’s a good chance you work, or at least have more than a passing interest, in transport. And as a transport researcher, I sometimes find myself holding conflicting views - one example being sharing of location data. In my day-to-day life, I am that person who clicks “reject all” on website cookie popup windows, and selects “Do not share” when an app wants to know my location for no good reason.
As a researcher, through, data is at the heart of everything I do, and there’s never enough of it. I want to know how people are moving, where they start, where they finish, and it’s constantly frustrating that the main publicly accessible source of detailed comprehensive travel data is a census, focusing only on work-based travel, that was carried out over ten years ago.
So it was interesting to read the Geospatial Commission’s report “Public dialogue on location data ethics” (PDF here) which attempts to unpick the public’s feelings about location data sharing and reconcile this with the potential to use this data for public good - a topic that’s come to the fore since the COVID-19 pandemic showed us that location data can literally be a matter of life and death.
Rather than just gathering vox pops or doing a survey, the report’s authors took a workshop-based approach, giving specialist presentations to 85 participants to leave them better-informed about the way location data is collected and used. I like this idea: if you’re giving up your time to participate in an exercise like this, it’s probably better to come away feeling informed and empowered than with an Amazon voucher.
The report does make it clear that there’s huge scepticism over the handling and use of data - a “data trust deficit” which is at its highest when the data gatherers are commercial companies. Potentially bad news then for transport operators, which in the UK are largely private entities these days.
But there’s a brighter side: participants said they were noticeably more willing to share location data when they received a useful service in return. One obvious example of this is route planning, such as Google Maps - a very valuable product to the company. While I can’t say I feel unbridled joy at sharing my location data with the big G, I use Maps weekly if not daily, so in a sense it barely matters if I opt out of sharing location data for their other products. And Maps is much more useful than old school offline satnav devices, thanks to its incorporation of live user data on traffic levels, incident reports and the like (although the less said about its cycle routing, the better - more on which in a bit).
Respondents were also receptive to the idea of using location data as part of planning processes. While the phrase “public good” wasn’t explicitly defined, participants in the workshops seemed to know it when they saw it, acknowledging active travel-friendly cities, pollution reduction measures and accessible routes as benefits of data sharing.
There is a limited amount you can cover in a few workshops, but I do wish the subject of open data had been discussed. Having access to data that anyone can find online isn’t just useful for small transport consultancies - there are more tools out there than ever before to help the public process, visualise, analyse and understand it, whether it’s through clever intermediary websites, or doing it from scratch via open source software like QGIS. The report uses the term “digital resignation” to describe the feelings that many of the public have towards the use of their data by corporations - a state of affairs in which many tech companies are undeniably complicit. Open data seems to be an antidote to this, a democratic vision of the way in which the power of data can be harnessed by anyone with a laptop and a web connection, so it’s a shame it seems to have been skipped over.
For some of us, data means much more than annoying targeted adverts, and the report sheds some important light on groups for whom unreliable or insecure data could have very real consequences. Amongst these are disabled people, whose experience may simply not be reflected in the aggregated world of data. I’ve suffered this, to a much lesser extent, when Google Maps’ cycling directions tells me to haul a heavy cargo bike up a steep flight of stairs. I might be an outlier as a cyclist, but that doesn’t mean I deserve a worse experience, yet that’s what assumptions based on data alone can create.
The accuracy of data was also raised, using Simon Weckert’s shopping trolley-full-of-phones hack as an example. Pranks aside, this is a concern which I’ve written about before (Indeed, my local bus driver still tends to wave me on board without scanning my ticket when they see me struggling with a bag of shopping and a toddler - Hopefully Ticketer and their ilk are making allowances for this when calculating passenger numbers).
Location data throws up a complex mix of concerns over privacy and commercial exploitation, but carries the potential for public benefits. Perhaps the main takeaway from the report is that when we’re armed with knowledge about how it all works, we’re in a much better position to choose what and how we share.