Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Social Implications Of Covert Policing, Simon Bronitt, Clive Harfield, K. Michael

Clive Harfield

Police agencies have been accused of suffering from an acute form of technophilia. Rather than representing some dreadful disorder, this assessment reflects the strong imperative, both in police agencies and the wider community, that police must have access to the latest technologies of surveillance and crime detection.

The last decade has witnessed the proliferation of low-cost surveillance technologies, some developed specifically for law enforcement purposes. Technology once the preserve of the military or secret intelligence agencies is now within the reach of ordinary general duties police officers. The new generation of police recruits is highly adept at using new technologies. …

Location And Tracking Of Mobile Devices: Überveillance Stalks The Streets, Katina Michael, Roger Clarke

Professor Katina Michael

During the last decade, location-tracking and monitoring applications have proliferated, in mobile cellular and wireless data networks, and through self-reporting by applications running in smartphones that are equipped with onboard global positioning system (GPS) chipsets. It is now possible to locate a smartphone-user's location not merely to a cell, but to a small area within it. Innovators have been quick to capitalise on these location-based technologies for commercial purposes, and have gained access to a great deal of sensitive personal data in the process. In addition, law enforcement utilise these technologies, can do so inexpensively and hence can track many …

Towards A Conceptual Model Of User Acceptance Of Location-Based Emergency Services, Anas Aloudat, Katina Michael

Professor Katina Michael

This paper investigates the introduction of location-based services by government as part of an all-hazards approach to modern emergency management solutions. Its main contribution is in exploring the determinants of an individual’s acceptance or rejection of location services. The authors put forward a conceptual model to better predict why an individual would accept or reject such services, especially with respect to emergencies. While it may be posited by government agencies that individuals would unanimously wish to accept life-saving and life-sustaining location services for their well-being, this view remains untested. The theorised determinants include: visibility of the service solution, perceived service …

Recommendations For Australia’S Implementation Of The National Emergency Warning System Using Location-Based Services, Anas Aloudat, Katina Michael, Roba Abbas

Professor Katina Michael

Mobile alerts, notifications and location-based emergency warning systems are now an established part of mobile government strategies in an increasing number of countries worldwide. In Australia the national emergency warning system (NEWS) was instituted after the tragic Black Saturday Victorian Bushfires of February 2009. In the first phase, NEWS has enabled the provision of public information from the government to the citizen during emergencies anywhere and any time. Moving on from traditional short message service (SMS) notifications and cell broadcasting to more advanced location-based services, this paper provides executive-level recommendations about the viability of location-based mobile phone services in NEWS …

The Application Of Location Based Services In National Emergency Warning Systems: Sms, Cell Broadcast Services And Beyond, Anas Aloudat, Katina Michael

Professor Katina Michael

Location-based services can be broadly defined as any service that provides information pertinent to the current location of an active mobile handset at a specific window of time, regardless of the underlying delivery technology used to convey its information. To date, the short message service and cell broadcast service have been utilised by several countries during emergencies, however the future indicates that these services while cost-effective today, will almost certainly be superseded in the next five to ten years by newer more powerful capabilities. The path forward in location-based emergency services in Australia is given against a backdrop of the …

Heaven And Hell: Visions For Pervasive Adaptation, Ben Paechter, Jeremy Pitt, Nikola Serbedzijac, Katina Michael, Jennifer Willies, Ingi Helgason

Professor Katina Michael

With everyday objects becoming increasingly smart and the “info-sphere” being enriched with nanosensors and networked to computationally-enabled devices and services, the way we interact with our environment has changed significantly, and will continue to change rapidly in the next few years. Being user-centric, novel systems will tune their behaviour to individuals, taking into account users’ personal characteristics and preferences. But having a pervasive adaptive environment that understands and supports us “behaving naturally” with all its tempting charm and usability, may also bring latent risks, as we seamlessly give up our privacy (and also personal control) to a pervasive world of …

The Social Implications Of Covert Policing, Simon Bronitt, Clive Harfield, K. Michael

Professor Katina Michael

Police agencies have been accused of suffering from an acute form of technophilia. Rather than representing some dreadful disorder, this assessment reflects the strong imperative, both in police agencies and the wider community, that police must have access to the latest technologies of surveillance and crime detection.

The last decade has witnessed the proliferation of low-cost surveillance technologies, some developed specifically for law enforcement purposes. Technology once the preserve of the military or secret intelligence agencies is now within the reach of ordinary general duties police officers. The new generation of police recruits is highly adept at using new technologies. …

Spatial Cloaking Revisited: Distinguishing Information Leakage From Anonymity, Kar Way Tan, Yimin Lin, Kyriakos Mouratidis

Kyriakos MOURATIDIS

Location-based services (LBS) are receiving increasing popularity as they provide convenience to mobile users with on-demand information. The use of these services, however, poses privacy issues as the user locations and queries are exposed to untrusted LBSs. Spatial cloaking techniques provide privacy in the form of k-anonymity; i.e., they guarantee that the (location of the) querying user u is indistinguishable from at least k-1 others, where k is a parameter specified by u at query time. To achieve this, they form a group of k users, including u, and forward their minimum bounding rectangle (termed anonymzing spatial region, ASR) to …

Überveillance: 24/7 X 365 People Tracking & Monitoring, Mg. Michael, K. Michael

M. G. Michael

No abstract provided.

Human Tracking Technology In Mutual Legal Assistance And Police Inter-State Cooperation In International Crimes, Katina Michael, G. L. Rose

Professor Katina Michael

The objective of this paper is to explore the role of human tracking technology, primarily the use of global positioning systems (GPS) in locating individuals for the purposes of mutual legal assistance (MLA), and providing location intelligence for use in inter-state police cooperation within the context of transnational crime. GPS allows for the 24/7 continuous real-time tracking of an individual, and is considered manifold more powerful than the traditional visual surveillance often exercised by the police. As the use of GPS for human tracking grows in the law enforcement sector, federal and state laws in many countries are to a …

The Importance Of Scenarios In Evaluating The Socio-Ethical Implications Of Location-Based Services, L. Perusco, Katina Michael

Professor Katina Michael

Location-based services (LBS) are those applications that utilize the position of an end-user, animal or thing based on a given device (handheld, wearable, interwoven into fabric or implanted), executed for a particular purpose. LBS applications range from those that are mission-critical to those that are used for convenience, from those that are mandatory to those that are voluntary, from those that are targeted at the mass market to those that cater for the needs of a niche market. Location services can be implemented using a variety of access mediums including global positioning systems and radio-frequency identification, rendering approximate or precise …

Location-Based Services: A Vehicle For It&T Convergence , Katina Michael

Professor Katina Michael

Location-based services (LBS), more than any other mobile commerce application area has served to bring together information technology and telecommunications (IT&T) industries. While much has been written on the potential of LBS, literature on how it is a catalyst for digital convergence is scant. This paper identifies and explores the various levels of converging technologies in mobile commerce by using three LBS case studies. Through literal replication the findings indicate that IT&T technologies are converging at the infrastructure, appliance and application level. It is predicted that mCommerce applications will increasingly rely on industry convergence to achieve their desired outcomes.

Location-Based Services And The Privacy-Security Dichotomy, Katina Michael, L. Perusco, M G. Michael

Professor Katina Michael

Location-based services (LBS) rely on knowledge of a user’s location to provide tailored services or information by means of a wireless device. LBS applications have wide-ranging implications for society, particularly in the context of tracking and monitoring groups of individuals such as children, invalids, and parolees. Despite a great deal of attention paid to technical and commercial aspects of LBS technologies, consideration of the legal, ethical, social and technology momentum issues involved has been wanting. This paper examines some of the more pressing issues that are expected to arise from the widespread use of LBS. The outcome of this paper …