Toward Addressing Location Privacy Issues: New Affiliations with Social and Location Attributes

Vgena Vgena,Kitsiou Kitsiou,Gritzalis Gritzalis,Kavroudakis Kavroudakis,Kalloniatis Kalloniatis

doi:10.3390/fi11110234

Vgena Vgena, Kitsiou Kitsiou + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/fi11110234

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Journal: Future Internet	Publication Date: Nov 1, 2019
Citations: 7	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of the Aegean, University of Piraeus

Abstract

Nowadays, location-sharing applications (LSA) within social media enable users to share their location information at different levels of precision. Users on their side are willing to disclose this kind of information in order to represent themselves in a socially acceptable online way. However, they express privacy concerns regarding potential malware location-sharing applications, since users’ geolocation information can provide affiliations with their social identity attributes that enable the specification of their behavioral normativity, leading to sensitive information disclosure and privacy leaks. This paper, after a systematic review on previous social and privacy location research, explores the overlapping of these fields in identifying users’ social attributes through examining location attributes while online, and proposes a targeted set of location privacy attributes related to users’ socio-spatial characteristics within social media.

Highlights

Social media’s popularity and the availability of sharing one’s location instantly in such detail raises questions in handling socio-spatial information [1,2,3]
The papers have been divided into the following six categories: namely, papers that refer to geosocial networks, papers discussing the representation of user’s identity in geosocial networks through geolocation information, papers that examine users’ concerns and privacy issues, and papers focusing on threats that may arise due to the information leak of a user’s location
We focus on matching attributes of geolocation information to attributes of social identity, and we discuss the location privacy issues that arise due to geolocation information or digital identities attributes disclosure

Summary

Introduction

Social media’s popularity and the availability of sharing one’s location instantly in such detail raises questions in handling socio-spatial information [1,2,3]. Privacy issues are thought to be of prior importance while users interact in social media applications. Users’ privacy concerns, which are triggered by malicious users, seem to engage social software engineering researchers in a vital dialogue aiming to design appropriate solutions to address those needs. Hardly a day goes without users being perplexed or discussing their privacy concerns, it seems that their insecurities do not prevent them from possessing accounts and using location-sharing applications while sharing social and location information in all levels of granularity [5]. Users are willing to unveil parts of their intimacy, turning them into entertainment content that will be consumed as extimacy (public content that is shared and uploaded online) for engaging in social media encounters [7]

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