research-article

General Area or Approximate Location?: How People Understand Location Permissions

Authors:

Huiqing Fu,

Janne LindqvistAuthors Info & Claims

WPES '14: Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society

Pages 117 - 120

https://doi.org/10.1145/2665943.2665957

Published: 03 November 2014 Publication History

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Abstract

More than half of American adults use smartphones and about two thirds of them use location-based services. On Android smartphones, these location-based services are implemented by apps. Android phones provide two location-related permissions: "precise" location and "approximate" location. In this paper, we present an online survey of 106 Android users to investigate how people understand location descriptions related to their apps. Our results suggest that most participants considered the "precise" location to mean their exact location and the "approximate" location as a general area. This mental model of the "approximate" location seems to allay people's privacy concerns related to their apps. However, after participants were shown the ground truth of how accurate "approximate" location actually is, twice as many participants no longer thought "approximate" location offered enough protection, compared to before showing the ground truth. Our results indicate that the location permissions might mislead smartphone users about the privacy protections the apps are providing.

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Cited By

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Abraham MMcgill MKhamis M(2024)What You Experience is What We Collect: User Experience Based Fine-Grained Permissions for Everyday Augmented RealityProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642668(1-24)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642668
Heitmann SPagotto AKray C(2024)Approximate vs. precise location in popular location-based servicesJournal of Location Based Services10.1080/17489725.2024.231000619:1(1-42)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1080/17489725.2024.2310006
Bourdoucen ANurgalieva LLindqvist J(2023)Privacy Is the Price: Player Views and Technical Evaluation of Data Practices in Online GamesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36110647:CHI PLAY(1136-1178)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3611064
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General Area or Approximate Location?: How People Understand Location Permissions

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WPES '14: Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society

November 2014

218 pages

ISBN:9781450331487

DOI:10.1145/2665943

General Chair:
Gail-Joon Ahn
Arizona State University, USA
,
Program Chair:
Anupam Datta
Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 03 November 2014

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CCS'14: 2014 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

November 3, 2014

Arizona, Scottsdale, USA

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Abraham MMcgill MKhamis M(2024)What You Experience is What We Collect: User Experience Based Fine-Grained Permissions for Everyday Augmented RealityProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642668(1-24)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642668
Heitmann SPagotto AKray C(2024)Approximate vs. precise location in popular location-based servicesJournal of Location Based Services10.1080/17489725.2024.231000619:1(1-42)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1080/17489725.2024.2310006
Bourdoucen ANurgalieva LLindqvist J(2023)Privacy Is the Price: Player Views and Technical Evaluation of Data Practices in Online GamesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36110647:CHI PLAY(1136-1178)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3611064
Li BWang GElahi HDuan G(2019)A Light-Weight Framework for Pre-submission Vetting of Android Applications in App StoresDependability in Sensor, Cloud, and Big Data Systems and Applications10.1007/978-981-15-1304-6_28(356-368)Online publication date: 5-Nov-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1304-6_28
Ramachandran SDimitri AGalinium MTahir MAnanth ISchunck CTalamo M(2017)Understanding and granting android permissions: A user survey2017 International Carnahan Conference on Security Technology (ICCST)10.1109/CCST.2017.8167834(1-6)Online publication date: Oct-2017
https://doi.org/10.1109/CCST.2017.8167834
Clark GSarode SLindqvist JZhang X(2016)No time at allProceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Hot Topics in Wireless10.1145/2980115.2980117(12-16)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2980115.2980117
Wijesekera PBaokar AHosseini AEgelman SWagner DBeznosov K(2015)Android permissions remystifiedProceedings of the 24th USENIX Conference on Security Symposium10.5555/2831143.2831175(499-514)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2831143.2831175

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Privacy as part of the app decision-making process

A Review on Location Based Services for Mobile Games

Study of compliance of Android location APIs with Geopriv

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