Gamification, the use of game design elements in applications that are not games, has been developed to provide attractive environments and maintain user interest in several domains. In domains such as education, marketing and health, where gamification techniques are applied, user engagement in applications has increased. In these applications the protection of users’ privacy is an important aspect to consider, due to the applications obtaining a record of the personal information of their users. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to identify if applications where gamification is applied do respect users’ privacy. For the accomplishment of this aim, two main steps have been implemented. Since the main principle of gamification is the existence of game elements, the first step was to identify the set of game elements recorded in the literature that are commonly applied in various applications. Afterwards, an examination of the relationship between these elements and privacy requirements was implemented in order to identify which elements conflict with the privacy requirements leading to potential privacy violations and which elements do not. Α conceptual model according to the results of this examination was designed, which presents how elements conflict with requirements. Based on the results, there are indeed game elements which can lead to privacy violations. The results of this work provide valuable guidance to software developers, especially during the design stages of gamified applications since it helps them to consider the protection of users’ privacy in parallel from the early stages of the application development onwards.

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Nowadays, location-sharing applications (LSA) within social media enable users to share their location information at different levels of precision. Users on their side are willing to disclose this kind of information in order to represent themselves in a socially acceptable online way. However, they express privacy concerns regarding potential malware location-sharing applications, since users’ geolocation information can provide affiliations with their social identity attributes that enable the specification of their behavioral normativity, leading to sensitive information disclosure and privacy leaks. This paper, after a systematic review on previous social and privacy location research, explores the overlapping of these fields in identifying users’ social attributes through examining location attributes while online, and proposes a targeted set of location privacy attributes related to users’ socio-spatial characteristics within social media.