Location Misuse

Data about physical location pose unique and weighty challenges to user privacy and sense of security online. Location data collected for an innocuous purpose can easily be misused by a motivated actor to harass, stalk, threaten or steal from a victim. Because it is impossible to discern whether a location is being shared or used maliciously (and the state of this can easily change over time), platform responses should instead focus on three broad sets of principles to make location misuse less likely:

1. Prevent Collection - only collect the location data that the platform strictly needs for it's operations, and maintain an aggressive schedule for it's deletion.
2. Minimize Visibility - when displaying or sharing location data, minimize the audience that has the capacity to see it, and give users fine grained control over this capability where appropriate.
3. Options for Takedown - Give users robust tools to react to inappropriate use of their location happening on the platform, like one-report takedown of location data, or location-data wipeout.

Though none of these approaches are going to solve the problem of location misuse, each has the strong potential to make the problem less frequent, and less severe when it does occur.