GIS Related Information Governance

This discussion is sorely needed in the GIS profession, and I put a lot of blame on higher education for neglecting this topic.

That said, here is some interesting, if not outdated, literature on the topic. The only real consensus between these resources is that there is no consensus in the GIS profession regarding personal privacy, but it should be a major concern.

Ethics of GIS | Jeremy Crampton

Protecting Personal Privacy in Using Geographic Information Systems | Harlan J. Onsrud, Jeff P. Johnson and Xavier Lopez | LINK UPDATED 1/11/17

Privacy and Confidentiality in Health GIS | LINK UPDATED 1/11/17

These are the rules given by Eurostat when it asks to report locations of holdings. Locations are reported with rounded coordinates and in certain cases by applying an additional semi-random offset. I don't know if they give a good rule of thumb but at least these rules are used by a well-known European authority.

Concerning the location of the holding two principles are applied: (i) precise coordinates are not required; and (ii) a location with just one holding will be recoded.

(i) precise coordinates are not required: the longitude and latitude coordinates will not be required in terms of seconds or decimal fractions of minutes. It will be necessary to provide the location only to the nearest 5 minutes, which represent a land area of approximately 3,000-7,000 ha, depending on the location in Europe.

ii) a location with just one holding will be recoded: It is possible that in areas with very large holdings, the location specified to the nearest 5 minutes longitude and latitude may contain only one holding which would therefore be directly identifiable. To ensure that direct identification cannot take place, the locality with only one holding should be allocated to the nearest neighbouring point (chosen at random) with at least one another holding. If any of the 8 neighbouring locations do not have at least one holding, the neighbouring locations have to be extended until others are located with at least one other holding. However, whenever it is possible the agricultural holding should be allocated to the NUTS 3 region where it is situated.

This is very interesting field.

My first suggestion are these articles:http://dk-giscience.zgis.net/index.php/37-website/255-kounadi-ourania from researcher who has PHD disertation on that topic.

And this about masking sensitive geographic data: http://www.cartographicperspectives.org/index.php/journal/article/view/cp49-leitner-curtis

Also about health data: http://www.ij-healthgeographics.com/content/8/1/46