Published in 2013 Data Protection Law & Policy (Volume 10, Issue 10), this article discusses both the challenges to privacy presented by crowdsourcing, and the solutions that corwdsouring brings to existing privacy concerns.
Crowdsourcing creates particular risks for privacy, but also provides some novel and effective enhancements for privacy. Crowdsourcing apps generally create fairly rich data about their users, even when ostensibly anonymous data is provided. In addition, some novel crowdsourcing technologies record very specific data about our faces, emotions, location and much more which quite apart from their potential for abuse create a fairly sinister feeling of being observed in a most intimate way. Finally, some crowdsourcing technologies have citizens collaborate with police in a way, which though all in a good cause, creates considerable privacy risk. Conversely, crowdsourcing is starting to provide some highly novel, exciting and effective ways to protect privacy. Our devices and apps can learn, and then meet, our privacy expectations and demands. We can be alerted when our use of crowdsourcing sites and other apps is inconsistent with our privacy aspirations, and in that way too crowdsourcing can limit the privacy risk associated with crowdsourcing.