Doctoral Dissertation Research: Geoprivacy Attitudes and Personal Location-Masking Strategies of Internet Users

这一博士论文研究项目将调查公众对地理盗用的态度，以及互联网用户在从事在线活动时试图掩盖或掩盖其个人位置以保护隐私的程度。该项目将提供有关个人在请求定位时防止其个人身份识别的策略的新知识，并将提供对隐私态度和响应定位请求的行为之间的关系的新见解。虽然许多关于地球掠夺的工作都集中在研究人员保护人类受试者匿名性的策略上，但这个项目将强调个人在管理自己的位置档案方面所发挥的作用。该项目将加强对与掩蔽位置倾向有关的因素的基本了解，这将为今后的研究提供信息，这些研究假定自我报告的位置是真实的，为误差计算提供更可靠的基础。提高对谁在网上屏蔽他们的数据以及他们为什么这样做的了解，将有助于应用程序开发人员更好地了解如何为这些个人提供服务。结果将广泛传播给广泛的潜在受益者，包括寻求保护数字隐私的非营利组织和国家地理空间咨询委员会等政府组织。作为博士论文研究改进奖，该奖项还将提供支持，使有前途的学生能够建立强大的独立研究生涯。地理共享指的是个人控制其个人位置数据何时以及如何共享的权利。在日益普遍的位置数据收集中，公众行使这种控制的尝试在很大程度上仍未被探索。这位进行该项目的博士生将研究成年人在网上屏蔽他们的位置数据的方式，以及地理竞争知识和态度如何影响这种位置屏蔽行为。她将对加利福尼亚州的成年人进行在线调查，使用概率样本和邮件联系方法来提高响应率，并使用在线征集的开放样本。她将用Logistic回归分析调查中提供的位置分辨率和真实性的相关性。学生会考虑的中间变量包括以前的隐私侵犯、黑客或身份盗窃经验以及数据行业经验。她还将测试位置掩蔽活动水平较高和较低的空间集群。

This doctoral dissertation research project will examine public attitudes towards geoprivacy and the extent to which Internet users attempt to obscure or mask their personal locations in order to protect privacy when they engage in online activity. The project will provide new knowledge about the strategies individuals employ to prevent their personal identifiability when location is requested, and it will provide new insights into the relationships between privacy attitudes and behavior in responding to location requests. While much work on geoprivacy focuses on strategies for researchers to protect the anonymity of human subjects, this project will emphasize the role individuals play in managing their own location profiles. This project will enhance basic understanding of the factors associated with the propensity to mask location, which will inform future research that assumes self-reported location to be factual by providing a sounder basis for error calculation. Improved knowledge about who is masking their data online and why they are doing so will help application developers better understand how to serve those individuals. Results will be disseminated broadly to a wide range of potential beneficiaries, including non-profit groups that seek to protect digital privacy and governmental organizations like the National Geospatial Advisory Committee. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.Geoprivacy refers to the right of individuals to control when and how their personal location data are shared. Amid increasingly pervasive locational data collection, attempts by the public to exercise this control largely remain unexplored. This doctoral student conducting this project will examine the ways in which adults mask their location data online as well as how geoprivacy knowledge and attitudes influence this location-masking behavior. She will conduct an online survey of adults in California using a probability sample with a mail contact method to enhance response rate and an open sample with an online solicitation. She will analyze the correlates of both the resolution and factuality of location provided in the survey with logistic regression. Among intervening variables that the student will consider are previous privacy infringement, experience with hacking or identity theft, and data industry experience. She also will test for spatial clusters of higher and lower levels of location-masking activity.