I’m the Mayor of My House: Examining Why People Use a Social-Driven Location Sharing Application

There have been many location-sharing applications developed over the past two decades, and only recently have these kinds of applications started to see adoption by consumers. In this paper, we present the results of interviews and two surveys to understand how and why people use locationsharing applications, as well as how they manage their privacy, focusing on the foursquare check-in system. We also document some surprising uses of foursquare, and discuss some implications for design for other mobile social services.

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