Personal identification and geoinformation technologies: Legal issues and implications

Geoinformation technology includes remote sensing (RS) and geographic information (GI) systems. Geoinformation technologies rely on spatial attributes as well as informational characteristics. Used together the technology provides the 'intelligence' to track people, their shopping and travel habits, and other activities in space. Such technologies have begun to play important and crucial roles in development, business, agriculture and monitoring. Both RS and GI have the potential to be fundamental technologies for any of application area. However, both can also be tainted with the spectre of being totally intrusive to the extent of identifying of people, places, their homes. Hence, the uses to which such technology are employed will depend wholly on the users as well as the rules and obligations that are imposed on such technologies. Here ethical and privacy concerns come foremost to mind and one may ask what protections against the misuse of these technologies exist. This paper examines the emergent legal issues, the legislation in place and industry practice in monitoring the use (and misuse) of spatial data in different countries. There may be a lack of understanding of privacy issues raised by such technology, and yet there may also be legal issues and implications arising that need addressing.