Abstract

Location-based applications bring ever more possibilities for the users: finding a soulmate, locating good restaurants in vicinity, or tracking a lost phone. Benefits are abundant, but, whether the user realizes it or not, so are the risks. This raises questions about what the users of locationbased applications think happens with their location data, whether they see the usage as a tradeoff between benefits and risks, and whether they attempt to protect themselves from privacy risks. We conducted a set of semi-structured interviews (N = 41) with an explorative approach to investigate smartphone users' perceptions of location-based applications. Among other things, we investigated the benefits that have been experienced, the risks that cause concern, and the expectations of what happens with the location data. The data was then analyzed to further study the relationships between these concepts. Our results suggest that trusting individuals see more benefits in location-based applications than others, and on the other hand, those who express mistrust report more risks than others. Interestingly, participants with some limitations in their knowledge of location-based applications said more often than others that there are no risks in using location-based applications. On the other hand, participants with good knowledge seem to be protecting themselves from privacy risks more.

Data integration, data sharing, and standardized analyses are important enablers for data-driven medical research. Circadian medicine is an emerging field with a particularly high need for coordinated and systematic collaboration between researchers from different disciplines.

Location-based mobile tools provide effective means for mobile participation, allowing better targeting of users and faster opinion gathering for municipalities and organizations. For participation purposes it is essential to reach the users as widely as possible, and for this, smartphones with ever-increasing adoption rates offer an optimal tool. However, privacy concerns might prevent the use of locationbased applications, which results in a bias in opiniongathering. In this paper, we present results of a field study tackling the issue of how privacy concern affects the adoption and use of a location-based mobile participation application, and what motivates the use of such applications. We find that users have varying motivations for participating in locationbased polls, and that these motivations depend on the type of the poll in question. We show that privacy concerned users are less likely to be motivated by a monetary benefit, but rather by the importance of the topic, and that the intrinsic motivators that drive the privacy concerned users differ from those that drive the unconcerned. Finally, we show that, based on our study, it seems that privacy concern might be an inhibiting factor in adoption of a location-based mobile participation application.

No abstract