What is Your Location Privacy Worth? Monetary Valuation of Different Location Types and Privacy Influencing Factors

Abstract

Nowadays, many apps use location data to estimate the user’s behavior for targeted advertising, predicting significant locations, personal preferences, state of health, and sports activities. Users of location-based services are often left with no other choice than to accept or reject location tracking when they want to use various applications. Especially, users with higher privacy concerns may reduce the frequency of location tracking by turning it off in the settings. However, most users are unaware that many applications installed on their phones are continuously tracking them. Therefore, this study attempts to answer how (obviously) being tracked over one-week influences a user’s privacy concerns. The study was implemented using an iOS app, which participants could install on their smartphones. Moreover, over one week, the participants were requested to answer daily mini-questionnaires about how much they would be willing to pay for the protection of their location information on a monthly basis and how much money they were willing to accept in exchange for their location information. Hereby, the context was an important criterion to determine how the monetary values vary among different location types for, among others, home location, work location, and meeting family and friends. The participants (N=51) interacted with the app on a daily basis by filling out various daily mini-surveys based on their significant locations visited. The results show a significant difference between the monetary valuating of willingness to pay and to accept for all location types except work location and sharing scenarios contributing to further empirical evidence for the endowment effect. The obvious fact of continuously being tracked did not increase the privacy concern of participants.