As Location-Sharing Services Grow, Privacy Concerns Do Too
As the list of programs that collect users’ location information grows, concern about privacy risks is increasing along with it.
Facebook is set to add location-sharing to its popular site next month. Meanwhile, services such as Foursquare and Loopt have been adding users, and a plethora of smaller tools have sprung up as well. But a study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University showed that the majority of the more than 80 location services it surveyed either don’t have privacy policies or collect and save all data for an indefinite amount of time.
The Carnegie Mellon study found that people value the ability to find others in an emergency and get information based on their location. Lorrie Cranor, an associate professor of computer science and one of the authors of the study, said people also value location-based advertising in some circumstances–a good thing for the companies that are building a business around precisely that. But she said many people just don’t realize what a database of all the locations they’ve been at over time could mean.
