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.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to establish reciprocity among socio-location attributes while underlining the additional users’ privacy implications on social media (SM).
Design/methodology/approach
Digital identity theories, social software engineering theory and the Privacy Safeguard (PriS) methodology were considered while reviewing 32 papers for identifying users’ SM attributes. After proposing interrelations among socio-location attributes, the PriS method was used to match social aspects of privacy in designing case studies to illustrate the associations through potential users’ privacy implications.
Findings
Eighteen users’ SM attributes were collected and correlated to the Face, Frame, Activity, Time and Stage (FFrATS) 4 W (socio-location attributes), which provoke further privacy implications due to the notions of self-determination and self-disclosure on SM. The authors draw on the PriS methodology to address privacy’s multidimensionality while creating case studies to examine privacy issues arising due to socio-location attribute disclosure and users’ trajectories and normativity lines.
Research limitations/implications
Supplementary case studies and research are needed to enable the design of a socio-spatially and privacy-aware designing methodology.
Practical implications
Designing proper methodologies and techniques to address users’ privacy implications deriving from socio-location attributes can provide designers with a technical solution to SM platforms.
Social implications
Socio-location attribute disclosure constructs representative SM profiles; however, the revelation of attributes and their interrelations create additional privacy implications for SM users.
Originality/value
Deepening the understanding of disclosing socio-location attributes on SM while bridging the socio-technical gap will provide the necessary background for proposing technical solutions to protecting users’ privacy.
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