Preference-based location sharing: are more privacy options really better?

We examine the effect of coarse-grained vs. fine-grained location sharing options on users' disclosure decisions when configuring a sharing profile in a location-sharing service. Our results from an online user experiment (N=291) indicate that users who would otherwise select one of the finer-grained options will employ a compensatory decision strategy when this option is removed. This means that they switch either in the direction of more privacy and less benefit, or less privacy and more benefit, depending on the subjective distance between the omitted option and the remaining options. This explanation of users' disclosure behavior is in line with fundamental decision theories, as well as the well-established notion of "privacy calculus". Two alternative hypotheses that we tested were not supported by our experimental data.

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