Considerations of Privacy, Ethics and Legal Issues in Volunteered Geographic Information

Abstract

Today almost any kind of User Generated Content (UGC) can be situated within a geographic context. Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) can include many types of UGC, such as georeferenced photographs, social media and text, geographic data themselves, etc. There are legal, privacy and ethical issues raised by VGI, and at present these are not very well studied or understood despite the rise in popularity of VGI. This chapter will discuss, investigate and define some of the most prominent issues related to the legal, privacy and ethics topic within VGI. The chapter argues that these issues are not well understood by all of the actors in VGI, and in particular by the producers of this information as well as the users or consumers of this new data source. Creating a better understanding of these issues will be very important in the future development and evolution of VGI in society.