Privacy Guidelines for Location Disclosure
July 7, 2005 by PingThis paper describes a study that tested how and when people chose to reveal their location information using a mobile phone. From time to time users would receive messages requesting their location and they could choose how and whether to reply. The phone also offered automatic disclosure functions (to periodically send location information to other people, or to automatically reply to location queries), but people didn’t like to use these features. Whereas the first prototype queued location requests in an Inbox, a later prototype displayed requests only transiently, relieving receivers of the burden of managing a long list of messages, and also allowing receivers to plausibly claim that they missed requests.
Based on the results of the study, the paper suggests that automatic disclosure functions should not be introduced by default and that tools should support the ability to easily deny requests and send deceptive replies.