Nowadays, many apps use location data to estimate the user's behavior for targeted advertising, predicting significant locations, personal preferences, state of health, and sports activities. Users of location-based services are often left with no other choice than to accept or reject location tracking when they want to use various applications. Especially, users with higher privacy concerns may reduce the frequency of location tracking by turning it off in the settings. However, most users are unaware that many applications installed on their phones are continuously tracking them. Therefore, this study attempts to answer how (obviously) being tracked over one-week influences a user's privacy concerns. The study was implemented using an iOS app, which participants could install on their smartphones. Moreover, over one week, the participants were requested to answer daily mini-questionnaires about how much they would be willing to pay for the protection of their location information on a monthly basis and how much money they were willing to accept in exchange for their location information. Hereby, the context was an important criterion to determine how the monetary values vary among different location types for, among others, home location, work location, and meeting family and friends. The participants (N=51) interacted with the app on a daily basis by filling out various daily mini-surveys based on their significant locations visited. The results show a significant difference between the monetary valuating of willingness to pay and to accept for all location types except work location and sharing scenarios contributing to further empirical evidence for the endowment effect. The obvious fact of continuously being tracked did not increase the privacy concern of participants.

Android applications request specific permissions from users during the installations to perform required functionalities by accessing system resources and personal information. Usually, users must approve the permissions requested by applications (apps) during the installation process and before the apps can collect privacy- or security-relevant information. However, recent studies have shown that users are overwhelmed with the information provided in privacy policies and do not understand permission requests and which functionalities are necessary for certain applications. Hereby, the collection of personal information remains mostly hidden, as the task of verifying to which information different apps have access to can be very complicated. Therefore, it is necessary to develop frameworks and apps that enable the user to perform informed decisions about apps’ run-time permission access to facilitate the control over sensitive information collected by various apps on smartphones. In this work, we conducted an online study with 70 participants who interacted with a mockup app that enables advanced control over permission requests. The selected permissions are based on the apps’ run-time permission access patterns and explanations, and commonly known visual cues are used to facilitate the user’s understanding and privacy-conscious decision making. Furthermore, the effects of perceived control over information sharing and privacy awareness are examined in combination with the permission manager mockup app to investigate if increased control over information sharing increases general privacy awareness.

Location-based mobile tools provide effective means for mobile participation, allowing better targeting of users and faster opinion gathering for municipalities and organizations. For participation purposes it is essential to reach the users as widely as possible, and for this, smartphones with ever-increasing adoption rates offer an optimal tool. However, privacy concerns might prevent the use of location-based applications, which results in a bias in opinion-gathering. In this paper, we present results of a field study tackling the issue of how privacy concern affects the adoption and use of a location-based mobile participation application, and what motivates the use of such applications. We find that users have varying motivations for participating in location-based polls, and that these motivations depend on the type of the poll in question. We show that privacy concerned users are less likely to be motivated by a monetary benefit, but rather by the importance of the topic, and that the intrinsic motivators that drive the privacy concerned users differ from those that drive the unconcerned. Finally, we show that, based on our study, it seems that privacy concern might be an inhibiting factor in adoption of a location-based mobile participation application.