The first part of the session involved a questionnaire that was handed to the participants to fill in, containing the following Likert-scale questions:
• Question A. Are you satisfied from the privacy settings offered to you by web applications?
• Question B. Most of the broadly used privacy settings are based on the concept of “who has access to see your data”. Are you satisfied with them?
Participants were prompted to choose between a range of five different answers: “Agree completely” - 1, “Agree” - 2, “Neutral” - 3, “Disagree” - 4, and “Disagree completely”
- 5. Table 6.1 shows the mean answers to these questions per group.
Group Question A Question B
Male student 2.0 (Agree) 2.0 (Agree) Female student 2.1 (Agree) 2.3 (Agree) Research student 3.8 (Disagree) 3.2 (Neutral) Table 6.1: Mean answers to questions A and B per group.
Discussing whether they are satisfied with the current privacy settings, the research students appeared to be rather dissatisfied expressing that they do not understand them:
“I’m unhappy more because I don’t understand, rather than because they may or may not satisfy my needs.”
For the final two Likert-scale questions the different options were: “Never” - 1, “Rarely”
- 2, “Once a month or so” - 3, “More than once a week” - 4, and “All the time” - 5. The mean answers to these questions are displayed in Table 6.2.
• Question C. In your mobile device do you ever turn on the location settings?
• Question D. How often do you post your location in a social network (e.g. Face-book, Twitter, Google+)?
Group Question C Question D Male student 4.7 (All the time) 3.2 (Once a month or so) Female student 3.9 (More than once a week) 3.4 (Once a month or so) Research student 3.4 (Once a month or so) 2.0 (Rarely)
Table 6.2: Mean answers to questions C and D per group.
Although quantitative outcomes cannot be produced through focus groups, the purpose of the questionnaire was to conduct an initial screening of the participants in each session.
It appears that the participants of the first two groups (male and female undergraduate students) were more satisfied with the current privacy settings and at the same time they were more eager to share their location online than the research students. These findings are somewhat expected, as the research students actively study topics related to privacy and security, hence it is sensible to assume that they might question more the efficiency of current online privacy systems than any other user of these systems.
As described briefly in the previous section, the main part of each focus group session consisted of a discussion around the participants’ location sharing decisions in different scenarios. The following subsections describe the findings of the qualitative analysis of the focus group data.
6.2.1 Scenario-based questions
During each session three scenarios were presented to the participants:
• a Facebook scenario where they were asked whether they would share their location if they were at the airport about to go on holidays,
• a Wikipedia scenario asking them whether they would share their location with Wikipedia in order to explore interesting things around the campus of the univer-sity, and
• a Twitter scenario where they were asked whether they would share their location with their Twitter followers if they were at a concert.
Each scenario was presented through a small description along with some visual aid (e.g. pictures from the user interface of each application, which are included in the handout that was given to the participants, see AppendixB). Participants were expected to answer “Yes”, “Maybe” or “No” and then justify their answer in the context of a discussion.
Answer Facebook Twitter Wikipedia
Yes 11 4 15
Maybe 5 7 4
No 3 4 0
No Answer 0 4 0
Table 6.3: Answers to scenarios from all the participants of all three groups.
Table6.3illustrates the answers of the participants to these questions. It is evident that in the Facebook and Wikipedia scenarios people were willing to negotiate their privacy and potentially share their location online. In the case of Twitter several participants either stated that they do not know how to post tweets with their location or that they would write where they are (or what they are doing) in the 140 characters of their tweet (instead of using the geo-tagged functionality of Twitter).
Note: In the Twitter scenario there were a few participants who did not have a Twitter account, therefore did not answer the question.
6.2.1.1 Analysis per application
Facebook Scenario.“You are travelling abroad with a friend of yours (also your Face-book friend) and at the moment you are at the airport. Would you post your location on your Facebook wall?”
Group Yes Maybe No
Male student 4 2 0
Female student 6 1 0
Research student 1 2 3
Table 6.4: Participant answers to the Facebook scenario.
The answers from the participants of each group are presented in Table6.4. As the Table illustrates, the majority of the male and female undergraduate students were willing to share their location on Facebook in the scenario given.
Twitter Scenario.“You are attending a concert in London and thinking about tweeting about it. Would you tweet with your location?”
Group Yes Maybe No
Male student 2 2 1
Female student 2 0 3
Research student 0 5 0
Table 6.5: Participant answers to the Twitter scenario.
In this scenario most participants — male and female — argued that most probably they would not tweet with their GPS location on, but they would rather state within their tweet where they are. As stated earlier, some female participants argued that they did not know how to use the geo-tagged functionality of Twitter.
Interestingly, all research students (who are Twitter users) would debate tweeting with their location depending on the scenario.
Wikipedia Scenario.“You are visiting Southampton for the first time with a friend and wish to visit the sights of the area near the university. Your friend suggests using Wikipedia, as it shows on a map links to the Wiki pages of all the nearby sights. Would you allow Wikipedia to determine your location?”
Wikipedia
Group Yes Maybe No
Male student 5 1 0
Female student 6 1 0
Research student 4 2 0
Table 6.6: Participant answers to the Wikipedia scenario.
This scenario was by far the one where participants felt more comfortable to share their location. Therefore, most of the participants from all three groups answered “Yes”.