From "I have nothing to hide" to "It looks like stalking": Measuring Americans' Level of Comfort with Individual Mobility Features Extracted from Location Data

TL;DR

This study investigates American privacy perceptions regarding location data features, revealing that trajectory data raises higher privacy concerns and that demographic factors influence comfort levels, with implications for policy regulation.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of privacy perceptions of location data features and models these perceptions to inform policy and privacy practices.

Findings

Trajectory features evoke higher privacy concerns.

Data obfuscation practices can increase user comfort.

Demographics like race, ethnicity, and education influence privacy perceptions.

Abstract

Location data collection has become widespread with smart phones becoming ubiquitous. Smart phone apps often collect precise location data from users by offering \textit{free} services and then monetize it for advertising and marketing purposes. While major tech companies only sell aggregate behaviors for marketing purposes; data aggregators and data brokers offer access to individual location data. Some data brokers and aggregators have certain rules in place to preserve privacy; and the FTC has also started to vigorously regulate consumer privacy for location data. In this paper, we present an in-depth exploration of U.S. privacy perceptions with respect to specific location features derivable from data made available by location data brokers and aggregators. These results can provide policy implications that could assist organizations like the FTC in defining clear access rules. Using a factorial vignette survey, we collected responses from 1,405 participants to evaluate their level of comfort with sharing different types of location features, including individual trajectory data and visits to points of interest, available for purchase from data brokers worldwide. Our results show that trajectory-related features are associated with higher privacy concerns, that some data broker based obfuscation practices increase levels of comfort, and that race, ethnicity and education have an effect on data sharing privacy perceptions. We also model the privacy perceptions of people as a predictive task with F1 score \textbf{0.6}.