General Area or Approximate Location?: How People Understand Location Permissions

Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society Pub Date : 2014-11-03 DOI:10.1145/2665943.2665957

Huiqing Fu, J. Lindqvist

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引用次数: 11

Abstract

More than half of American adults use smartphones and about two thirds of them use location-based services. On Android smartphones, these location-based services are implemented by apps. Android phones provide two location-related permissions: "precise" location and "approximate" location. In this paper, we present an online survey of 106 Android users to investigate how people understand location descriptions related to their apps. Our results suggest that most participants considered the "precise" location to mean their exact location and the "approximate" location as a general area. This mental model of the "approximate" location seems to allay people's privacy concerns related to their apps. However, after participants were shown the ground truth of how accurate "approximate" location actually is, twice as many participants no longer thought "approximate" location offered enough protection, compared to before showing the ground truth. Our results indicate that the location permissions might mislead smartphone users about the privacy protections the apps are providing.

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大致区域还是大致位置?:人们如何理解位置权限

超过一半的美国成年人使用智能手机，其中约三分之二使用基于位置的服务。在Android智能手机上，这些基于位置的服务是由应用程序实现的。Android手机提供两种与位置相关的权限:“精确”位置和“近似”位置。在本文中，我们对106名Android用户进行了在线调查，以调查人们如何理解与他们的应用程序相关的位置描述。我们的结果表明，大多数参与者认为“精确”位置是指他们的确切位置，而“近似”位置是一个一般区域。这种“大致”位置的心理模式似乎减轻了人们对与应用程序相关的隐私担忧。然而，在向参与者展示了“近似”位置的准确程度之后，与显示基本事实之前相比，不再认为“近似”位置提供足够保护的参与者是之前的两倍。我们的研究结果表明，位置权限可能会误导智能手机用户对应用程序提供的隐私保护的认识。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society

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