Examining Privacy Concern in Social-Driven Location Sharing: An Empirical Study on Chinese Popular SNSs

Sharing location in SNSs has witnessed rapid development in recent years. Privacy is undoubtedly a barrier to the adoption of such location sharing services. In this paper, we investigate what factors affect users´ privacy concerns and how privacy concerns may in turn affect users´ location sharing behaviors. We conducted one quantitative survey and 8 interviews on Chinese popular SNSs. We identified 1) the factors that users care more about their privacy when posting location information on social networks, 2) what types of privacy information do they think might be exposed through location sharing, and 3) users´ behavior patterns in cope with privacy concerns. We also discuss the theoretical and practical implication on the improvement of location sharing services.