Condiciones de Vida

A pre-study evaluation of the participants’ privacy concerns with the application was conduc- ted to understand the relationship between their level of experience with the application, their location sharing behaviour and their privacy concerns. Most of the participants were moderate users (check-in several times per week) (57.6%), while the rest were frequent users (check-in once or more per day) (42.4%). In addition, most participants would enable location services on their mobile devices (52% enable them frequently (always on) and 43% enable them mod- erately (when required by an application). The remaining participants are either not sure how to enable this feature (3%) or they always disable it (2%). Similarly, most of them use social network applications daily (85%), whereas the rest use them occasionally (14%). As expected, most of the participants read the Terms of Use and Privacy Policies only sometimes (50%) or never (21%).

Accessibility to the user’s personal data by other users is a primary privacy concern. This is commonly controlled by defining the visibility of one’s profile in the privacy settings of the network. ‘Friends’ on Foursquare are granted access to the full location history and thus can potentially have access to a complete geo-profile. However, it is interesting to note that people will accept friendship requests from strangers and in fact may not be fully aware of their friendship links. This idea was examined in the questionnaire where participants were asked if they actually know all of their friends (or would accept friendships with users whom they do not know), and revealed that only 31.7% of users know all their friends (44.4% know most of them, and 23.4% know some of them), as shown in Figure 5.4(a).

While most of the participants stated that they currently feel safe using Swarm (87%), 64% of them believe check-ins can be dangerous and want to control others’ access to their check-

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ins, as presented in Figure 5.4(b). This can denote that the user may misunderstand how privacy implications can occur in terms of the relationship between the application and the consequences of using it. When asking participants to explain their answers, those who thought check-ins could be harmful mentioned the fact that a Swarm friend could be an attacker “If a ‘friend’ has malicious intent, I can be tracked down and be subject to physical harm. Also, there is always the risk that data will be stolen and is used without my consent”. In addition, many participants reported the risk of advertising their absence from home “Anyone who follows you can know where you are at the exact moment. Robbers can know that you are not home.”, and the risk of being stalked and spammed “If someone got access to my Swarm check-in data they could easily use it to help them stalk me or to find out about my friends and harass them and me.” Furthermore, some of them brought the possibly of inferring personal information and routines “If someone is skipping work/school, etc, this acts as proof they were skipping.” and “Check-ins tell a lot about my activities in Swarm.”. Others mentioned the threat of access to and exploitation of their data by others “By publicising your location you provide information not only to individuals (whom you may not want to see), but also to companies, who may use that information about your daily patterns/habits to spam you.” and “It could be harmful if the data is accessed by third parties and misused if there is any sort of security breach”.

As for those who felt that check-ins are not dangerous, they seem to be less aware of the potential privacy risks that may result from the access to and utilisation of their location data. They also tend to trust the application. Their most common justifications include: “They are safe and fast. We can securely check in” and “I believe that they never share my personal things to any third parties or use it for some other purpose”.

(a) (b)

Figure 5.4: (a) Participants’ knowledge of their Swarm friends, (b) Participants’ views on location sharing.

Similarly, 78% of participants reported that they value their check-ins information, as shown in Figure 5.5(a), yet 60% of them were actually willing to sell their check-in data for $50

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and less, as illustrated in Figure 5.5(b). When examining users’ awareness towards their data collection and use as presented in Figure 5.6, 82% of the participants reported that they know who can see their check-in data. Nevertheless, their knowledge boundaries do not make it clear whether they are awareness related to their friends’ accessibility only or other parties as well (i.e. other users of the service or third parties). More than half of the participants (59%) know that Foursquare shares their personal data with third-party agencies for targeted-marketing and advertising purposes, whereas fewer (48%) are aware that their data can be used for other purposes. 67% of the participants stated their awareness of Foursquare’s collection of their location data even when not using the app.

(a) (b)

Figure 5.5: (a) Participants’ view on whether check-ins are valuable , (b) willingness to sell check-in data by participants.

Figure 5.6: Participants’ awareness of their data collection and use.

When considering the use of Swarm privacy settings by the participants, 40% have updated only one privacy setting, and 7% have not changed any. The most updated privacy settings, as presented in Figure 5.7(a) are “Who can see my contact information” (25%) and “Enabling my friends to check me in and including my name on their social accounts” (24%). Surprisingly, the least selected ones are “Allowing Swarm to use my background location even when the app closed” (10%) and “Allowing Foursquare to serve behavioural targeted ads for outsiders” (4%). Moreover, the majority of the participants thought that the privacy settings provided were

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sufficient to protect their privacy (71%), but many (46.15%) also admitted to not checking their privacy settings for a long time as demonstrated in Figure 5.7(b).

(a) (b)

Figure 5.7: (a) The participants’ updated Swarm privacy settings , (b) When the parti- cipants have checked their privacy settings.

It is interesting to note the seemingly contradictory findings, where no evident link can be observed between the extent of visibility of location data and the sense of risk associated with disclosure of personal location with privacy concerns (feeling safe). One possible explanation is that user’s awareness is related directly to the needs of the task being executed. Thus, awareness is limited to the location data a user is sharing at any point in time while using the application, hence her/his privacy concerns are also limited to this part of her/his data set. This observation is supported by examining responses to the question on which aspects of their location history they are able to recall, where 47% were able to recall only one aspect, and 2.7% remembered nothing of their history. Figure 5.8(a) shows what aspects of location history participants were able to recall. Furthermore, 31% reported that they have difficulty retrieving their check-in history, while 4% are not able to as displayed in Figure 5.8(b).

(a) (b)

Figure 5.8: (a) Aspects of location history participants were able to recall , (b) ease of retrieving check-in history by the participants.

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