HCI Research . Tara Matthews . tára@táramatthews.org

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Exploring Location Disclosure: Why, When, & What People Want to Share

Advances in location-enhanced technology are making it easier for us to be located by others. These new technologies present a difficult privacy tradeoff, as disclosing one’s location to another person or service could be highly risky, yet valuable. To explore whether and what users are willing to disclose about their location to social relations, we conducted a three-phased formative study. One phase, as depicted in the images above, involved two weeks of Experience Sampling on Palm Pilots that probed participants for their thoughts and feelings on location disclosure. Our results show that the most important factors were who was requesting, why the requester wanted the participant’s location, and what level of detail would be most useful to the requester. After determining these, participants typically wanted to disclose either the most useful detail or nothing about their location. From our findings, we reflect on the decision process for location disclosure. With these results, we hope to provide guidance to designers of location-enhanced applications and services.

People
I interned at Intel Research Seattle from May - August of 2004. During that time, I worked with Sunny Consolvo on this study. When I arrived, a formative research question was defined. Our project group (Sunny, Ian Smith, Anthony LaMarca, and me) ended up changing it quite a bit with the help of many researchers at Intel, before beginning to design the study. At least a month was spend designing the study, of which I was heavily involved. First, I focused quite a bit on the social networking exercises in Phase 1 of the study. Next, I worked on developing the ESM questionnaires. We all worked to be sure that our design would answer the research questions set forth and that the data gathered would be valid. Sunny, and I spend a month conducting the study phases with help from Jennifer Roads (a fellow intern). We then spent a few weeks analyzing data with Ian, Anthony, and Jason Tabert.

Ian and Anthony are continuing work on location and privacy in the PlaceLab project.

Publications

Sunny Consolvo, Ian E. Smith, Tara Matthews, Anthony LaMarca, Jason Tabert, Pauline Powledge. "Location Disclosure to Social Relations: Why, When, & What People Want to Share." In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI). Portland, OR, pp. 81-90, 2005.

Presentations

Tara Matthews and Sunny Consolvo. "Location Disclosure to Social Relations: Why, When, & What People Want to Share." CHI 2005. Portland, Oregon. (ppt | pdf)

 

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