Privacy and Social Effects in Location Sharing Services

Location-aware technologies enable users with increasing, and often invisible, interconnected location-aware information services with one another and with the Internet, especially on mobile devices such as smart phones. Considering that the services seamlessly support individual users in their daily tasks and life, as well as the services are increasingly dealing with personal information, user's privacy of revealing private information are encountering with significant raising challenges. Today our understanding of people's concerns about location sharing preferences remains very limited, including how privacy preferences are context dependent, and how social benefits counteract privacy concerns so that leading to location sharing behavior. By adopting the cost-effectiveness analysis principles, we have conducted an experiment, in which people's willingness to share according to social context and privacy concerns were observed. Interesting findings were found and some of them are different previous research findings. As a work in-progress study, our study also suggests that further economical exploration of whether social benefits could offset the privacy concern costs may be an important avenue of study.