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Location Privacy in the Digital Society

Thematic Session @ SDSS2025

About

As digital mapping and location-based services become integral to daily life, the issue of location privacy grows increasingly critical. This thematic session will build upon the momentum from last year and continue exploring the intersection of privacy, technology, and geography, focusing on the ethical and technological challenges associated with geospatial data collection and usage. In this thematic session, we invite papers that explore the theoretical, methodological, and applied perspectives on location privacy, spanning issues such as geodata masking, privacy risk assessment, mobility trajectories, and the ethical implications of emerging sensor technologies. The session will also highlight innovative frameworks, policy approaches, and technical solutions for enhancing privacy protections while ensuring the benefits of geospatial technologies can be fully realized.

Call For Papers

We invite submissions of applied, theoretical, or methods-based research on location privacy and spatial data science.

Topics (but not limited to)
  • Privacy-aware geospatial data models
  • Location privacy risk assessment and projection methods
  • Privacy in geo-distributed data centers
  • Location privacy and accuracy of spatial information
  • Location privacy and geospatial data utility
  • Privacy issues of mobility data (e.g., GPS trajectory, cellphone location data)
  • Citizen science, location-based social networks, and their geoprivacy concerns
  • Emerging technologies (e.g., blockchain, metaverse) and their privacy and ethical implications
  • Geosurveillance and responsible use of spatial data

Paper Format
All accepted papers, including extended abstracts and short papers, will be archived in the session proceedings on Zenodo with assigned DOIs. We follow the same formatting requirements as SDSS 2025 which can be found at https://sdss2025.spatial-data-science.net/#cfpapers. Manuscripts should be formatted according to the LNCS template (Overleaf template here). Authors should submit their work in PDF format via EasyChair. Extended abstracts should be 1,000 to 1,500 words, and short papers 2,500 to 3,000 words, excluding references. All papers will undergo a single-blind peer review process.

Important Dates

Organizers

Session Chairs

Hongyu Zhang, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Yue Lin, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign


Program Committee

Ourania Kounadi, University of Vienna

Eun-Kyeong Kim, Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research

More TBC...

Program

To be announced