Do Identity and Location Data Interrelate? New Affiliations and Privacy Concerns in Social-Driven Sharing

Abstract

Various researchers summarize that location-sharing applications are used extensively in users’ daily practice not only for getting advantage of services but also for representing themselves in the online sphere. At the same time, users’ privacy concerns are expressed in the most demanding way towards both social media applications and software designers. This incompatibility between users’ every day practice and their beliefs is widely discussed in the academic community, indicating the informational privacy paradox phenomenon. Although, there is no need to focus on the notion of paradox itself for the needs of our analysis, attention should be paid regarding possible affiliations with users’ personal information, i.e. location and identity attributes. Both location and identity characteristics are thought to potentially reveal users’ personal information, thus lead to users’ identification. What is more, users’ location and identity characteristics seem to interrelate while creating new possible affiliations. These new affiliations that arise through our analysis are going to represent the contribution of our work in hand. In that way, the affiliations may enable conclusions about user’s identity, thus, enable user’s identification. That is because, information may be connected in ways that were not present in the first place, revealing more information than the user originally intended. Last but not least, this paper proposes further explanation for informational privacy paradox as well. Therefore, it is vital to reconsider and adopt alternative privacy strategies.