ABSTRACT
Any advancement in technology is accompanied by new concerns over its ethical use and impacts on privacy. While a notoriously difficult term to define, privacy as it relates to technology usage, can be described as the ability of an individual or group to control their personal information. Like many ethical concepts, this definition evolves with changes in societal and technical norms. The emergence of machine learning and related artificial intelligence techniques has again shifted societal concerns about the privacy of our persons, socio-demographic group membership, and personal data. Location data are particularly sensitive as they link information across sources and can be used to infer a wide variety of personal information. This makes data privacy one of the most important ethical discussions within the field of geographic artificial intelligence (GeoAI). The main objective of this chapter is to explore the unique privacy concerns associated with AI techniques used for analyzing geospatial information. After providing an overview of the topic, we describe some of the most common techniques and leading application areas through which data privacy and GeoAI are converging. Finally, we suggest a number of ways that privacy within GeoAI can improve and highlight emerging topics within the field.
