Privacy attitudes

The last section of the survey includes theoretical questions regarding people’s privacy perceptions using Likert-scale responses. 125 out of 150 participants completed the

survey till the end and replied to all the theoretical questions.

The following figures illustrate participants’ answers to a set of questions regarding their attitudes towards online privacy and location sharing.

Figure 5.2 shows the respondents’ replies to the following two questions that deal with the way people control their online privacy:

• Question I. I believe I am able to take the appropriate steps to control when and how my location is released online.

• Question II. When an application requests my location, I am fully aware of the reasons why.

Each column in Figure 5.2 represents the number of participants who chose the corre-sponding option.

Figure 5.2: Responses to Question I and II.

Similarly, Figure 5.3 shows people’s level of concern regarding their online privacy in general as well as location privacy. The questions they were asked are the following:

• Question A. How concerned are you about threats to your online privacy?

• Question B. How concerned are you about the fact that your location might be used for other purposes too?

Figure 5.3: Participant concerns over their data.

As anticipated, the majority of the participants (approximately 80% for both questions) replied to these questions that they are either very concerned or somewhat concerned.

More specifically, in Question A 40% of the participants answered they are very cerned about threats to their online privacy, 40% replied that they are somewhat con-cerned about their privacy, whereas only 17% answered that they are not very concon-cerned.

With regards to Question B the majority of the participants (43%) replied that they are somewhat concerned about threats to their location privacy and 37% answered that they are very concerned.

Figure 5.4: Participant answers regarding Questions C and D.

Figure5.4illustrates participant responses to questions that deal with the management of their privacy settings:

• Question C. Do you make use of the privacy settings offered by Web applications to control access to your data?

• Question D. In your mobile device do you ever have the location services setting on?

In Question C the answers were distributed among all the possible choices. Still, the majority (64%) stated that they use their privacy settings at least once a month. In Question D the answers were also distributed among all the choices. The largest response group (30%) answered that they are not sure or they never have the location settings on in their devices, but a significant minority (48%) had location services on at least once a month.

Figure 5.5 shows people’s responses to questions that deal with their online location sharing attitudes:

• Question E. How often do you post your location in a social networking applica-tion (Facebook, Twitter etc.)?

• Question F. Do you ever allow an application to determine your current location?

Figure 5.5: Participant answers regarding Questions E and F.

In Question E most participants answered “Never/Not sure”, whereas in Question F all answers were distributed among all the options. In both questions only a very limited number of people (3% for social networks and 6% for apps) published their location all the time.

The final question was based on the outcomes of the study presented in the previous chapter, which stressed the primal role of location data in inferring other types of infor-mation. The question participants were asked was the following:

• Question G. Location-based websites may use your location to make assumptions about you. Please indicate how important it is for you to control these assumptions for each of the following types of information.

Figure 5.6: Importance of controlling inferences made by applications regarding cer-tain types of information

For any given type of information the answers varied; with the exception of people’s home address. The vast majority of participants (86%) found it important to control inferences based on their home address. However, as Figure 5.6 shows, for all types of information the majority of the responses were either “Very important” or “Important”.

In particular, 77% of participants found it important to be able to control inferences about their current health status, 63% about their interests, 79% about their every day itinerary, 70% about their current activity, 61% about their co-located friends and 67%

inferences on their current location. These results show that regardless of their sharing decisions, people wish to be able to control potential data inferences and aggregations.

5.2.4 The privacy paradox

By looking at all the graphs of the previous section it is evident that in most questions participants’ answers were highly dispersed between all the possible options. However, a number of observations were made:

• A majority of people are concerned about their privacy (80% responded concerned or somewhat concerned).

• A majority of people use privacy settings (64% responded that they use privacy settings at least once a month).

• A majority of people actively restrict access to their location (94% allow applica-tions to access their location once a week or less, whereas 97% post location on social networking sites once a week or less).

• A majority of people find it important to be able to control potential inferences based on location on various types of information (77% on current health status, 63% on interests, 79% on every day itinerary, 70% on current activity, 86% on home address, 61% on co-located friends and 67% on current location).

These findings are therefore in line with previous surveys on privacy attitudes. Existing work on personal data also discusses the existence of a privacy paradox, i.e. a dichotomy

between attitudes towards privacy and actual disclosure behaviour. This study aimed to investigate whether the privacy paradox also applies to location data.

The relationship between the responses of the participants in Questions A and B (pre-sented in the previous section) and their responses in the scenario-based questions, which were presented in section 5.2.2, could verify the existence of the paradox. To test this assumption, the different options in these two questions were transformed into numer-ical variables to represent Concern, with values “Very concerned” = 3, “Somewhat concerned” = 2, “Not very concerned” = 1, and “Not concerned at all” = 0. A new variable was also introduced named WillingnessToShare, which was the score of each participant’s answer in the three most popular scenarios (Facebook, Wikipedia, and Twitter). The score was calculated based on the answers the participant gave in each scenario (“Yes” = 2, “Maybe” = 1, and “No” = 0) divided by the number of answers.

For instance, if the participant answered “Yes” in the Facebook scenario, “Maybe” in the Wikipedia scenario and they did not answer the Twitter scenario (because they don’t use Twitter) the WillingnessToShare in this case would be 1.50.

Figure 5.7: Participant score with regards to location sharing.

Figure 5.7illustrates the frequency of different scores between the participants ranging from 0.00 to 2.00. 0.00 represents participants who answered “No” in all the scenarios, whereas 2.00 that refers to participants who answered “Yes” in all the scenarios.

Figure5.8and Figure5.9illustrate two scatter plots, where WillingnessToShare is in the horizontal axis and Concern (derived from Question A or B) is on the vertical axis. It is worth pointing out that some points in these plots represent a single response, whereas others represent many responses with the same values. A visual inspection of both plots suggests that there is no correlation between these variables. However, we wanted to test statistically the actual correlation between them. We executed the Kolmogorov-Smirnov and the Shapiro-Wilk tests for normality for all three variables — i.e. Question

Figure 5.8: Plot between WillingnessToShare and Concern in Question A.

A, Question B, and WillingnessToShare — and discovered that in all cases the data is not normally distributed (Sig. = 0.01). For this reason we conducted both a Pearson’s and a Spearman’s correlation test (assuming that Spearman’s would be less sensitive to outliers). The results of the correlation between Question A and Question B showed that there is a moderate correlation between them, which is statistically significant (Pearson’s r = 0.527, p = 0.001 and Spearman’s rs= 0.528, p = 0.001). In other words, people who are concerned about privacy in general also tend to be concerned about the privacy of their location data. However, the results of the correlation between WillingnessToShare and Concern measured in Question A (Pearson’s r = 0.067, p = 0.492 and Spearman’s r_s = 0.073, p = 0.453), as well as in Question B (Pearson’s r = 0.103, p = 0.285 and Spearman’s rs= 0.091, p = 0.348), were not statistically significant.

Figure 5.9: Plot between WillingnessToShare and Concern in Question B.

This finding supports the existence of the privacy paradox, since it shows that there is no strong correlation between people’s attitudes towards privacy and their disclosure decisions.

5.2.5 Gender differences

As mentioned before, 90 participants were male whereas 60 were female. We wished to identify potential differences between men and women in their responses, and more specifically, whether women tend to be more private than men online, as several studies have shown (see Chapter3). To that purpose, we investigated separately the answers of men and women in the scenario-based questions and revealed a few differences between them.

Wikipedia. Table 5.6 shows the responses of male and female participants to the Wikipedia scenario. It appears that a little over half of the male (58%) and a bit less than half of the female (43%) participants use Wikipedia. According to the table, most male participants were positive to the Wikipedia scenario (81%), however the majority of female participants was much more hesitant to share their location in this scenario (only 42% of female participants gave a positive answer). A chi-square test confirmed this statement (chi − square = 15.214 with df = 3, p = 0.002).

Wikipedia

Answer Women Men

Yes 42% 81%

Maybe 12% 9.5%

No 35% 9.5%

Not answered 11% 0%

Total Responses 26 53

Table 5.6: Gender Differences in Wikipedia scenario.

Twitter. As Table5.7indicates the vast majority of female participants who replied to the Twitter scenario gave a negative answer. On the other hand, the responses of male participants varied greatly, with 39% answering “No”, 25% “Maybe”, and 34% “Yes”.

Approximately half of the male participants use Twitter (49%) whereas less than half of the female participants (37%) are Twitter users. A chi-square test showed that there is a relationship between the choice of answer in the Twitter scenario and the gender (chi − square = 6.572 with df = 3, p = 0.087).

Twitter

Answer Women Men

Yes 23% 34%

Maybe 9% 25%

No 68% 39%

Not answered 0% 2%

Total Responses 22 44

Table 5.7: Gender Differences in Twitter scenario.

IMDb. Table5.8shows the gender differences in the IMDb scenario. The differences in the responses between the two genders were very small and according to the chi-square test there is no relationship between the choice of answer in the IMDb scenario and the gender (chi − square = 0.677 with df = 3, p = 0.879).

IMDb

Answer Women Men

Yes 45% 56%

Maybe 9% 6%

No 36% 38%

Not answered 10% 0%

Total Responses 22 34

Table 5.8: Gender Differences in IMDb scenario.

Facebook. Finally, Table 5.9 shows the gender differences in the Facebook scenario.

The majority of participants of both sexes gave negative answers and the chi-square test showed that there is no relationship between the choice of answer in the Facebook scenario and the gender (chi − square = 1.440 with df = 3, p = 0.696).

The results show that in comparison to male participants, female participants were much more reluctant to share their location in Wikipedia and Twitter. In the rest of the applications and their equivalent scenarios the gender did not have any relation with the choice of answer (“Yes”, “Maybe”, or “No”).

Facebook

Answer Women Men

Yes 13% 16%

Maybe 21% 30%

No 58% 52%

Not answered 8% 2%

Total Responses 53 73

Table 5.9: Gender Differences in Facebook scenario.