Location privacy revisited: factors of privacy decisions

The privacy problems associated with disclosing location information have repeatedly been the subject of research during the past decade. Yet, only the increasing adoption of smartphones today unveils real world implications, since a large number of users currently use location-based services and GPS-enabled devices for a multitude of purposes. Recently, research suggested that location privacy is not a relevant problem for today's users. However, a study we conducted indicates that it might be too early to call off investigations of location privacy: In a survey of 414 users on online media sharing behavior, we found that location was rated as the type of photo metadata that poses the highest risk to privacy. Therefore, we revisit the discussion on location privacy in this paper and propose factors that can explain the conflicting views.