Empirical models of privacy in location sharing

2012

Abstract We compared two privacy configuration styles for specifying rules for social sharing one's past locations. Our findings suggest that location-sharing applications (LSAs) which support varying levels of location granularities are associated with sharing rules that are less convoluted, are less likely to be negatively phrased, and can lead to more open sharing; users are also more comfortable with these rules. These findings can help inform LSA privacy designs.

Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Intelligent User Interfaces - IUI '14, 2014

Location-based systems are becoming more popular with the explosive growth in popularity of smart phones. However, the user adoption of these systems is hindered by growing user concerns about privacy. To design better location-based systems that attract more user adoption and protect users from information under/overexposure, it is highly desirable to understand users' location sharing and privacy preferences. This paper makes two main contributions. First, by studying users' location sharing privacy preferences with three groups of people (i.e., Family, Friend and Colleague) in different contexts, including check-in time, companion and emotion, we reveal that location sharing behaviors are highly dynamic, context-aware, audience-aware and personal. In particular, we find that emotion and companion are good contextual predictors of privacy preferences. Moreover, we find that there are strong similarities or correlations among contexts and groups.

2010

Due to the ability of cell phone providers to use cell phone towers to pinpoint users' locations, federal E911 requirements, the increasing popularity of GPS-capabilities in cellular phones, and the rise of cellular phones for Internet use, a plethora of new applications have been developed that share users' real-time location information online . This paper evaluates users' risk and benefit perceptions related to the use of these technologies and the privacy controls of existing location-sharing applications. We conducted an online survey of American Internet users (n = 587) to evaluate users' perceptions of the likelihood of several location-sharing use scenarios along with the magnitude of the benefit or harm of each scenario (e.g. being stalked or finding people in an emergency). We find that although the majority of our respondents had heard of location-sharing technologies (72.4%), they do not yet understand the potential value of these applications, and they have concerns about sharing their location information online. Most importantly, participants are extremely concerned about controlling who has access to their location. Generally, respondents feel the risks of using location-sharing technologies outweigh the benefits. Respondents felt that the most likely harms would stem from revealing the location of their home to others or being stalked. People felt the strongest benefit were being able to find people in an emergency and being able to track their children. We then analyzed existing commercial location-sharing applications' privacy controls (n = 89). We find that while location-sharing applications do not offer their users a diverse set of rules to control the disclosure of their location, they offer a modicum of privacy.

2013

ABSTRACT We examine the effect of coarse-grained vs. fine-grained location sharing options on users' disclosure decisions when configuring a sharing profile in a location-sharing service. Our results from an online user experiment (N= 291) indicate that users who would otherwise select one of the finer-grained options will employ a compensatory decision strategy when this option is removed.

2012

ABSTRACT We compared two privacy configuration styles for specifying rules for social sharing one's past locations. Our findings suggest that location-sharing applications which support varying levels of location granularities are associated with sharing rules that are less convoluted, are less likely to be negatively phrased, and can lead to more open sharing. It also results in higher perceived comfort scores, which could be indicative of a false sense of control.

Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security, 2009

A recent trend in social networking, photo/video sharing, and location-sharing services is a demand for more expres- sive privacy mechanisms that provide greater control over the conditions under which information is shared. We pro- vide a methodology to inform the design of such mechanisms by identifying the most relevant privacy dimensions for a particular user population. We performed a week-long

Location sharing systems often entail concerns about privacy when disclosing one's position.Users worry that their location could be traced by people they do not know sufficiently well -a side effect of large friend lists in social networks. Earlier research observed large-scale networks such as Foursquare or Google Latitude. In this work, we investigate how a spatially limited location sharing system affects check-in habits. We evaluated our work in a two-week explorative field study with an on-campus location sharing system, Ubiversity, we implemented for that purpose. Our results indicate that from a privacy point of view, users tend to disclose more willingly their location if it is limited to a local area, even those who refrain from using large location sharing systems like Foursquare. We also found that reasons for disclosing one's location in a local context are different from those in large social networks. The smaller spatial distances of check-ins simplify spontaneous meet-ups with friends and are a motivational factor for location sharing.

Proceedings of MobileHCI 2010

This paper presents a multi-pronged study of users’ location-sharing practices in the context of online social networks. The contribution of this study is two-fold: first it presents a series of insights relating to location-sharing practices, and second it highlights the use of third- person scenarios as a useful method for eliciting privacy concerns and potentially educating users.

Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2021

Continuous location sharing (CLS) can foster intimacy, for example, for couples in long-distance relationships. However, turning of CLS can then raise suspicions. To address this, we developed nuanced sharing settings in a focus group (N = 6) and implemented them to moderate CLS in an Android app. Crucially, the app also discloses each person's current sharing settings to the partner. In a 16-day feld study, four couples interacted with our app and the disclosed confgurations, confrming the disclosure's positive effect on transparency. However, features obfuscating the location were considered superfuous, as participants preferred sharing their location exactly or not at all. While participants overall appreciated having the confguration options, changes in their partners' confgurations raised questions about their motivations. Instead, participants would adjust the confguration for diferent intimacy levels (colleague vs. partner) rather than diferent activities when using CLS with the same person. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Field studies; Smartphones; Empirical studies in interaction design; • Security and privacy → Usability in security and privacy.

Advances in location-enhanced technology are making it easier for us to be located by others. These new technologies present a difficult privacy tradeoff, as disclosing one's location to another person or service could be risky, yet valuable. To explore whether and what users are willing to disclose about their location to social relations, we conducted a three-phased formative study. Our results show that the most important factors were who was requesting, why the requester wanted the participant's location, and what level of detail would be most useful to the requester. After determining these, participants were typically willing to disclose either the most useful detail or nothing about their location. From our findings, we reflect on the decision process for location disclosure. With these results, we hope to influence the design of future locationenhanced applications and services.