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Location privacy and public metadata in social media platforms: attitudes, behaviors and opinions

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Abstract

The highavailability of geolocation technologies is changing the social media mobile scenario and is exposing users to privacy risks. Different studies have focused on location privacy in the mobile scenario, but the results are conflicting: some say that users are concerned about location privacy, others say they are not. In this paper, we initially investigate attitudes and behaviors of people toward a location-aware scenario; then, we show users the amount of personal and sensitive data that can be extracted from contents publicly available in social platforms, and finally we ask for their opinions about a location-aware scenario. Results show that people who were not initially concerned about privacy are the most worried about the location-aware scenario; conversely, people who were initially concerned are less worried about the location-aware scenario and find the scenario interesting. A deeper analysis of the obtained results allows us to draw guidelines that might be helpful to build an effective location-aware scenario.

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Notes

  1. A music identification service available through a mobile app.

  2. Python Programming Language Official Website: http://www.python.org/

  3. http://code.google.com/p/geopy/

  4. Twitter API: http://dev.twitter.com/

  5. Instagram API: http://instagram.com/developer/

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Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve the quality of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Comunicazione ed Economia, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Reggio Emilia, Italy

    Marco Furini & Valentina Tamanini

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  1. Marco Furini
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  2. Valentina Tamanini
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Correspondence to Marco Furini.

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Furini, M., Tamanini, V. Location privacy and public metadata in social media platforms: attitudes, behaviors and opinions. Multimed Tools Appl 74, 9795–9825 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-014-2151-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-014-2151-7

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