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.

翻译：欧洲数字主权与安全日益取决于关键决策能否基于具备对抗压力可信度的位置证据。本文将跨领域分析重构为位置数据溯源问题：不仅关注设备或服务报告的位置信息，更涉及主张事件发生的时间地点是否存在可质疑证据、主张的生成主体及其可审计留存保障机制。在民主进程及信息环境、贸易及原产地敏感供应链、金融及非法运输流、关键基础设施及移动性、针对个体私人及社会领域的伤害行为中，均可观察到可复现的模式。这些模式呈现反复出现的不对称性：低成本断言地点、存在、路由或管辖权，而机构与受影响方在争议发生时却需承担高昂重构成本。为将挑战转化为可操作框架，本文提出精炼风险分类体系，将溯源失败分解为完整性主轴与反复失效模式，推导出面向争议可质疑性、同时兼容隐私与权利的新一代数字信任基础设施设计期望。论证应视位置为数字基元，以承载证据的主张而非自我宣称的坐标表示，并定位位置证明机制作为在明确威胁与隐私假设下生成可验证存在主张的能力候选层。最终形成面向欧洲新一代数字信任基础设施架构设计的跨领域基础。