An empirical investigation of attitude towards location-aware social network service

Abstract

There is currently an abundance of social network services available on the internet. In addition, examples of location-aware social network services are emerging. The use of such services presents interesting consequences for users' privacy and behaviour, and ultimately the adoption of such services. Yet, not a lot of explicit knowledge is available that addresses these issues. The work presented here tries to answer this by investigating the willingness to use location-aware service in a population of students during a three-week festival. The main findings show that most users are willing to use such systems, also on a larger scale. However, some reservations, particularly with regard to privacy, are uncovered.