Where Trust Fails: Mapping Location-Data Provenance Risks in Europe

2026-04-15

AI Summary

This study addresses the high cost of dispute resolution in adversarial settings, where location data underpinning high-stakes decisions often lacks credible provenance evidence. The work proposes reconceptualizing location not as self-reported coordinates but as evidentiary claims, and introduces a cross-domain provenance risk analysis framework centered on the contestability of event location, time, claimant identity, and audit retention mechanisms. Innovatively advancing “location as a digital primitive,” it establishes the first compact risk taxonomy tailored to contested scenarios and designs privacy-preserving proof mechanisms—such as Proof-of-Location—grounded in verifiable assertions of presence. The resulting neutral architectural foundation supports the development of next-generation digital trust infrastructures in Europe that jointly uphold privacy and contestability across multiple domains.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Machine Learning: Privacy
• Computer Vision: Bias, Fairness & Privacy

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity
• Semantics and Knowledge: Provenance, trust, security and privacy, and ethical issues in managing semantic data

Abstract

European digital sovereignty and security increasingly depends on whether high-impact decisions can be grounded in location evidence that remains credible under adversarial pressure. This paper frames a cross-sector analysis as a location-data provenance problem: not merely what a device or service reports as location, but whether there is contestable evidence about where and when an asserted event occurred, who or what produced the assertion, and under which audit and retention guarantees. There are observable patterns across democratic processes and the information environment, trade and origin-sensitive supply chains, finance and illicit shipping flows, critical infrastructure and mobility, and harms targeting individuals' private and social domains. In these patterns we see a recurring asymmetry in which locality, presence, routing, or jurisdiction can be asserted cheaply while institutions and affected parties face costly reconstruction when disputes arise. To make this challenge actionable, this paper introduces a compact risk taxonomy that decomposes provenance failures into integrity axes and recurring failure modes, and derives design expectations for next-generation digital trust infrastructure centered on contestability under dispute, while remaining privacy- and rights-compatible. It argues for treating location as a digital primitive that should be represented as evidence-bearing claims rather than self-asserted coordinates, and positions proof-of-location (PoL) mechanisms as a candidate capability layer for producing verifiable presence claims under explicit threat and privacy assumptions. The outcome is a sector-neutral foundation for future architectural work on a next-generation digital trust infrastructure for Europe.

Problem

• location-data provenance
• digital trust
• proof-of-location
• evidence integrity
• adversarial credibility

Innovation

• location-data provenance
• proof-of-location
• digital trust infrastructure
• contestability
• evidence-bearing claims