Location Disculosure

Location disclosure to social relations:Â why, when, & what people want to share by the Place Lab people, explores whether and what users are willing to disclose about their location to social relations. The goal wat to understand the decision process and other factors that go into their decision that could inspire the design of better location-enhances applications and services. Their most notable result is that:

Participants want to disclose what they think would be useful to the requester or deny the request. We saw no evidence of participants intentionally blurring their location, i.e., disclosing something vague, to protect their privacy

Other very interesting findings are:

• Participants typically disclosed the most useful detail about their location (which is not necessarily the most detailed) or did not disclose their location at all. They often chose to disclose less specific information because they thought something less specific would be more useful to the requester and not because they were uncomfortable giving the requester more detailed information
• Participants chose to not disclose their location rather than merely blurring, which suggests that they were using the response to reinforce or communicate social boundaries.
• Who the requester was had the strongest influence on participants’ willigness to discolse.
• What participants were doing when they received a request appeared to have some effect on whether they would discolse something about their location