The Effect of Privacy Concerns on Privacy Recommenders

Location-sharing services such as Facebook and Foursquare/Swarm have become increasingly popular, due to the ease at which users can share their locations, and participate in services, games and other applications that leverage these locations. But it is important for people who use these services to configure appropriate location-privacy preferences so that they can control to whom they want to share their location information. Manually configuring these preferences may be burdensome and confusing, and so location-privacy preference recommenders based on crowd-sourcing preferences from other users have been proposed. Whether people will accept the recommended preferences acquired from other users, who they may not know or trust, has not, however, been investigated. In this paper, we present a user experiment (n = 99) to explore what factors influence people's acceptance of location-privacy preference recommenders. We find that 44% of our participants have privacy concerns about such recommenders. These concerns are shown to have a negative effect (p < 0.001) on their acceptance of the recommendations and their satisfaction about their choices. Furthermore, users' acceptance of recommenders varies according to both context and recommendations being made. Our findings are potentially useful to designers of location-sharing services and privacy recommenders.