Please Enter Your Home Location: Geoprivacy Attitudes and Personal Location Masking Strategies of Internet Users

Abstract

Location masking, or geomasking, is a practice typically undertaken by data stewards who wish to release a georeferenced data set without infringing on the privacy of those whose data are involved. With numerous opportunities to transmit our personal locations through electronic devices, individuals have the agency through masking to stem the flow of their location data or otherwise engage in obscuring their locations. Relatively little is known about the factors that influence individuals to protect their location privacy and the extent to which they do so. Joining a growing recognition of individual-level privacy efforts, this study examines the predictors of personal-level location masking and the relationships among geoprivacy-related knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. Using a probability-based sample and an open online sample from California, this study finds that in situ personal masking behavior is consistent across demographic groups. A key attitude influencing whether or not participants choose to mask location is trust in Web sites to protect their personal data. Greater knowledge about how location data are transmitted and higher concern for privacy are positively correlated with masking behavior.

How do people perceive the disclosure risk of maps? Examining the perceived disclosure risk of maps and its implications for geoprivacy protection

“…Therefore, future studies should examine the effect of various geomasking methods on the perceived disclosure risk of maps. Moreover, the perceived disclosure risk measured in the survey may be inflated because people's opinions on locational privacy may be reinforced while conducting the survey (Seidl et al, 2020). Future studies might explore experiments to test alternative sets of wordings of the survey items to optimize results and to test for any bias.…”

PrivyTo: A privacy‐preserving location‐sharing platform

“…A considerable literature investigates the reasons why people choose to share their personal location information (Lindqvist, Cranshaw, Wiese, Hong, &, Zimmerman, 2011). While much of this research recognizes that privacy is a concern for most (Kokolakis, 2017; Seidl, Jankowski, Clarke, &, Nara, 2020), they find that for many users the benefits gained from location sharing through services (Budi et al, 2021) or social capital (Ellison, Vitak, Steinfield, Gray, &, Lampe, 2011) outweigh the perceived costs of a loss of privacy. For instance, Alrayes et al (2020) examined the factors contributing to perception of risk to personal privacy associated with sharing location information on social networking applications.…”

A Survey of User Perspectives on Security and Privacy in a Home Networking Environment

“…This is another popular area of research, with 66 papers. Some papers (32) focused majorly on this RQ and others (34) reflected on security and privacy behaviors while discussing other concepts such as privacy concerns, awareness, multi-users issues and related conceptual frameworks [4,47,58,61,63,68,70,84,98,100,103,105,114,116,118,123,126,130,134,135,141,144,146,150,164,167,173,178,181,183,187,188,195,200,202]. Here, we will focus on the 32 papers in the former group.…”

“…Seidl et al [164]'s study (survey, 𝑛 = 214) found that geo-privacy behaviors are very much linked to a participant's underlying knowledge of the field and similar across different demographic factors including gender, ethnicity and income level. Huang and Wu [81]'s comparative study on Chinese and US users revealed that users' privacy concerns in China seemed to be lower than in Western countries.…”