The DMRC Urban Media and Digital Geographies Symposium 2022 was held at QUT’s Kelvin Grove campus on 14 November 2022.
The symposium marked the completion of a four year long ARC funded study into the increasingly pervasive role of location data in Australian smartphone practices and cultures and the implications for users, industry, and the digital economy. With near-ubiquitous levels of smartphone use, spatial data and location-based services have become integrated within everyday lives. These services, however, rely on access to an individual’s location, raising privacy and surveillance concerns over this sensitive datapoint.
The symposium brought together speakers and panellists from academia, industry and government to discuss new insights into geodata and geoprivacy. It will raise questions focusing on the future of the location economy, how best to design for location privacy, consider the challenges with maintaining a social licence to operate smart cities and digital twins, and explore policy and regulatory responses.