Presentation By Dr. Bo Zhao, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ash Center of Harvard Kennedy School (HKS)
Thursday, December 3, 2015. Room S153, CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge St.
Abstract: Location spoofing refers to a variety of emerging online geographic practices that allow users to hide their true geographic locations. The proliferation of location spoofing in recent years has stirred debate about the reliability and convenience of crowd-sourced geographic information and the use of location spoofing as an effective countermeasure to protect individual geo-privacy and national security. However, these polarized views will not contribute to a solid understanding of the complexities of this trend. Even today, we lack a robust method for detecting location spoofing and a holistic understanding about its multifaceted implications. Framing the issue from a critical realist perspective, this talk aims to develop a Bayesian time geographic approach for detecting this trend in geospatial big data and to contribute to our understanding of this complex phenomenon from multiple perspectives. The empirical results indicate that the proposed approach can successfully detect certain types of location spoofing from millions of geo-tagged tweets. Drawing from the empirical results, I further examine the motivation for spoofing as well as other generative mechanisms of location spoofing, and discuss its potential social implications. Rather than conveniently dismissing the phenomenon of location spoofing, this talk calls on us to tackle this controversial issue head-on, especially when legal decisions or political policies are reached using data from location-based social media. Only then can we promote more effective and trustworthy geographic practices in the age of big data.
Author Bio: Dr. Bo Zhao focuses his research on the intersection of geography, big data and governance, with a particular emphasis on China. After receiving his Ph.D. in Geography from The Ohio State University in August 2015, Bo continued his research as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Kennedy School. During his fellowship, he has been working on understanding governance in China through citizens/crowd-sourcing knowledge.
Lunch will be served.
no links
Files:
location_spoofing.jpg
