Document Open Access Logo

Who Masks? Correlates of Individual Location-Masking Behavior in an Online Survey (Short Paper)

Authors Dara E. Seidl , Piotr Jankowski

PDF
Thumbnail PDF

File

LIPIcs.GISCIENCE.2018.57.pdf
  • Filesize: 352 kB
  • 6 pages

Document Identifiers

Author Details

Dara E. Seidl
  • Department of Geography, San Diego State University, 5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego, CA 92182, USA
Piotr Jankowski
  • Department of Geography, San Diego State University, 5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego, CA 92182, USA and Institute of Geoecology and Geoinformation, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1657610. This work was supported in part by a American Association of Geographers (AAG) dissertation grant and an American Geographical Society (AGS) fellowship.

Cite As Get BibTex

Dara E. Seidl and Piotr Jankowski. Who Masks? Correlates of Individual Location-Masking Behavior in an Online Survey (Short Paper). In 10th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2018). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 114, pp. 57:1-57:6, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2018) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.GISCIENCE.2018.57

Abstract

Geomasking traditionally refers to a set of techniques employed by a data steward to protect the privacy of data subjects by altering geographic coordinates. Data subjects themselves may make efforts to obfuscate their location data and protect their geoprivacy. Among these individual-level strategies are providing incorrect address data, limiting the precision of address data, or map-based location masking. This study examines the prevalence of these three location-masking behaviors in an online survey of California residents, finding that such behavior takes place across social groups. There are no significant differences across income level, education, ethnicity, sex, and urban locations. Instead, the primary differences are linked to intervening variables of knowledge and attitudes about location privacy.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Security and privacy → Human and societal aspects of security and privacy
Keywords
  • privacy
  • geoprivacy
  • geomasking
  • obfuscation
  • accuracy

Metrics

  • Access Statistics
  • Total Accesses (updated on a weekly basis)
    0
    PDF Downloads
    0
    Metadata Views

References

  1. Alessandro Acquisti and Jens Grossklags. Privacy attitudes and privacy behavior. In Economics of information security, pages 165-178. Springer, 2004. Google Scholar
  2. Marc P Armstrong, Gerard Rushton, Dale L Zimmerman, et al. Geographically masking health data to preserve confidentiality. Statistics in medicine, 18(5):497-525, 1999. Google Scholar
  3. Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum. Obfuscation: A user’s guide for privacy and protest. Mit Press, 2015. Google Scholar
  4. Kristen H Hampton, Molly K Fitch, William B Allshouse, Irene A Doherty, Dionne C Gesink, Peter A Leone, Marc L Serre, and William C Miller. Mapping health data: improved privacy protection with donut method geomasking. American journal of epidemiology, 172(9):1062-1069, 2010. Google Scholar
  5. Carsten Keßler and Grant McKenzie. A geoprivacy manifesto. Transactions in GIS, 22(1):3-19, 2018. Google Scholar
  6. Mei-Po Kwan, Irene Casas, and Ben Schmitz. Protection of geoprivacy and accuracy of spatial information: how effective are geographical masks? Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization, 39(2):15-28, 2004. Google Scholar
  7. Debra Siegel Levine and Michael J Strube. Environmental attitudes, knowledge, intentions and behaviors among college students. The Journal of social psychology, 152(3):308-326, 2012. Google Scholar
  8. Mary Madden and Lee Rainie. Americans' attitudes about privacy, security and surveillance. Pew Research Center, 2015. Google Scholar
  9. Susan Morgan and Jenny Miller. Communicating about gifts of life: The effect of knowledge, attitudes, and altruism on behavior and behavioral intentions regarding organ donation. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 30(2):163-178, 2002. Google Scholar
  10. Susan A Nolan and Thomas Heinzen. Essentials of statistics for the behavioral sciences. Macmillan, 2010. Google Scholar
  11. Erin Ruel, William Edward Wagner III, and Brian Joseph Gillespie. The practice of survey research. Sage, 2015. Google Scholar
  12. Dara E Seidl, Gernot Paulus, Piotr Jankowski, and Melanie Regenfelder. Spatial obfuscation methods for privacy protection of household-level data. Applied Geography, 63:253-263, 2015. Google Scholar
  13. David Swanlund and Nadine Schuurman. Mechanism matters: Data production for geosurveillance. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 106(5):1063-1078, 2016. Google Scholar
  14. David Swanlund and Nadine Schuurman. Resisting geosurveillance: A survey of tactics and strategies for spatial privacy. Progress in Human Geography, 2018. Google Scholar
  15. Hongwei Yang and Hui Liu. Prior negative experience of online disclosure, privacy concerns, and regulatory support in chinese social media. Chinese Journal of Communication, 7(1):40-59, 2014. Google Scholar
Questions / Remarks / Feedback
X

Feedback for Dagstuhl Publishing


Thanks for your feedback!

Feedback submitted

Could not send message

Please try again later or send an E-mail
© 2023-2024 Schloss Dagstuhl – LZI GmbH About DROPS Imprint Privacy Contact