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

Authors: Anders Kofod-Petersen, Per Anton Gransaether, John Krogstie

Addresses: Department of Computer and Information Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), 7491 Trondheim, Norway. ' Department of Computer and Information Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), 7491 Trondheim, Norway. ' Department of Computer and Information Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), 7491 Trondheim, Norway

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.

Keywords: mobile communications; social networks; location-aware services; user attitudes; social network usage; user privacy; user behaviour.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMC.2010.030520

International Journal of Mobile Communications, 2010 Vol.8 No.1, pp.53 - 70

Published online: 20 Dec 2009 *

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