Location-Based Services for Mobile Telephony: a study of Users' privacy concerns

Context-aware computing often involves tracking peoples' location. Many studies and applications highlight the importance of keeping people's location information private. I discuss two types of location based services; location-tracking services that are based on other parties tracking the user's location and position-aware services that rely on the device's knowledge of its own location. I present an experimental case study that examines people's concern for location privacy and compare this to the use of location-based services. I find that even though the perceived usefulness of the two different types of services is the same, location tracking services generate more concern for privacy than position-aware services. We conclude that development emphasis should be given to position-aware services but that location-tracking services have a potential for success if users are given a simple option for turning the location-tracking off