Ethical and Privacy Considerations with Location Based Data Research

Networking research, especially focusing on human mobility, has evolved significantly in the last two decades and now relies on collection and analyzing larger datasets. The increasing sizes of datasets are enabled by larger automated efforts to collect data as well as by scalable methods to analyze and unveil insights, which was not possible many years ago. However, this fast expansion and innovation in human-centric research often comes at a cost of privacy or ethics. In this work, we review a vast corpus of scientific work on human mobility and how ethics and privacy were considered. We reviewed a total of 118 papers, including 149 datasets on individual mobility. We demonstrate that these ever growing collections, while enabling new and insightful studies, have not all consistently followed a pre-defined set of guidelines regarding acceptable practices in data governance as well as how their research was communicated. We conclude with a series of discussions on how data, privacy and ethics could be dealt within our community.