Experiments like ‘Please Rob Me’ indicate that what people reveal via location-sharing apps could potentially be harmful to them – and survey finds concerns among users.
“More than half of people with geolocation-capable mobile devices worry about “loss of privacy” from using their location-sharing features, a survey has found – even though location-sharing apps such as FourSquare and Gowalla have millions of users checking in every day.
Among UK respondents, 52% said they were “very or extremely concerned” about loss of privacy from using location-sharing applications – even though the same proportion said that they geotag photos, indicating where they were taken, when uploading them to the internet.
The survey, commissioned by security company Webroot, interviewed 1,500 owners of devices with geolocation capabilities, including 624 people in the UK.”