Do Birds of a Feather Watch Each Other?: Homophily and Social Surveillance in Location Based Social Networks

Location sharing applications (LSA) have proliferated in recent years. Current research principally focuses on egocentric privacy issues and design but has historically not explored the impact of surveillance on location sharing behavior. In this paper, we examine homophily in friendship and surveillance networks for 65 foursquare users. Our results indicate that location surveillance networks are strongly homophilous along the lines of race and gender while friendship networks are weakly homophilous on income. Qualitatively, an analysis of comments and interviews provides support for a discourse around location surveillance, which is mainly social, collaborative, positive and participatory. We relate these findings with prior literature on surveillance, self-presentation and homophily and situate this study in existing HCI/CSCW scholarship.

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