"About your smartphone usage" — Privacy in location-based mobile participation

Abstract

Location-based mobile tools provide effective means for mobile participation, allowing better targeting of users and faster opinion gathering for municipalities and organizations. For participation purposes it is essential to reach the users as widely as possible, and for this, smartphones with ever-increasing adoption rates offer an optimal tool. However, privacy concerns might prevent the use of location-based applications, which results in a bias in opinion-gathering. In this paper, we present results of a field study tackling the issue of how privacy concern affects the adoption and use of a location-based mobile participation application, and what motivates the use of such applications. We find that users have varying motivations for participating in location-based polls, and that these motivations depend on the type of the poll in question. We show that privacy concerned users are less likely to be motivated by a monetary benefit, but rather by the importance of the topic, and that the intrinsic motivators that drive the privacy concerned users differ from those that drive the unconcerned. Finally, we show that, based on our study, it seems that privacy concern might be an inhibiting factor in adoption of a location-based mobile participation application.