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A comparative study of location-sharing privacy preferences in the United States and China

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Abstract

While prior studies have provided us with an initial understanding of people’s location-sharing privacy preferences, they have been limited to Western countries and have not investigated the impact of the granularity of location disclosures on people’s privacy preferences. We report findings of a 3-week comparative study collecting location traces and location-sharing preferences from two comparable groups in the United States and China. Results of the study shed further light on the complexity of people’s location-sharing privacy preferences and key attributes influencing willingness to disclose locations to others and to advertisers. While our findings reveal many similarities between US and Chinese participants, they also show interesting differences, such as differences in willingness to share location at “home” and at “work” and differences in the granularity of disclosures people feel comfortable with. We conclude with a discussion of implications for the design of location-sharing applications and location-based advertising.

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Notes

  1. By “cultural factors,” we mean to refer to a broad range of considerations, including beliefs, moral values, traditions, lifestyles, and related behavioral habits.

  2. By advertisers, participants were specifically instructed to think of location-based advertisers.

  3. For the university community and advertisers, participants only had the first three options to choose.

  4. A place was considered distinct only if it was 250 m from all other distinct places and the subject spent at least 15 min there.

  5. The work address usually referred to a campus building where he spent the most time on weekdays. For participants who lived on campus, home addresses referred to their dormitories.

  6. This group usually consists of a diverse population. It might also include random people our participants do not know in person.

  7. All the p values reported in the paper are two-tailed.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been supported by NSF grants CNS-0627513, CNS-0905562, CNS 10-1012763, and by ARO research grant DAAD19-02-1-0389 to Carnegie Mellon University’s Cylab. Additional support has been provided by the CMU/Portugal Information and Communication Technologies Institute, Nokia, France Telecom, Google, the National Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61170296), the State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment Grant BUAA SKLSDE-2012ZX-17, and the New Century Excellent Talents in University Grant NECT-09-0028. The authors would also like to thank Bin Dai and Yazhi Liu for helping conduct our study in China.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Jialiu Lin, Michael Benisch, Norman Sadeh, Jason Hong & Shaohui Guo

  2. School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beihang, China

    Jianwei Niu & Banghui Lu

Authors
  1. Jialiu Lin
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  2. Michael Benisch
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  3. Norman Sadeh
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  4. Jianwei Niu
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  5. Jason Hong
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  6. Banghui Lu
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  7. Shaohui Guo
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jialiu Lin.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 5.

Table 5 Regression model predicting average percentage of sharing time on nationality and recipient type
Full size table

Appendix 2

See Table 6.

Table 6 Regression model predicting average percentage of sharing time on nationality and location type
Full size table

Appendix 3

See Table 7.

Table 7 Regression model predicting average percentage of sharing time on nationality, location type, recipient, and all the possible interactions
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Lin, J., Benisch, M., Sadeh, N. et al. A comparative study of location-sharing privacy preferences in the United States and China. Pers Ubiquit Comput 17, 697–711 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-012-0610-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-012-0610-6

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