Towards Location Privacy Awareness on Geo-Social Networks

With the current trend of embedding location services within social networks, an ever growing amount of users' spatiotemporal tracks are being collected and used to generate user profiles. Issues of personal privacy and especially those stemming from tracking user location become more important to address. In this work, it is argued that support of location privacy awareness within social networks is needed to maintain the users' trust in their services. Current practices of pre-configuring location disclosure settings have been shown to be limited, where users' sense of location privacy dynamically change with context. In this paper, location privacy awareness is considered within a composite view of place, time and social data recorded in user profiles. The paper examines the possible threats to personal privacy from exposure of this data and the design of feedback tools to allow users to control their privacy. A user study is used to examine the impact of the feedback provided on users' perception of privacy and the link between their privacy concerns and their attitude towards using the geo-social network. Findings confirm the strong need for more transparent access to and control over user location profiles, and guide the proposal of recommendations to the design of more privacy-sensitive geo-social networks.