Understanding Purpose-Driven Use of Location Sharing Services

    Type: Master
    Status: Assigned March 2021
    Student: Jannis Strecker

    So-called “geosocial” applications allow one to share one’s current location with friends, families, or even the public. This thesis project investigates how the particular location sharing functionalities of a geosocial app, namely continuous, proximity-based and ad-hoc sharing, affect its actual use in daily life. To this end, it seeks to validate a Location Sharing Acceptance Model (LSAM) by Scipioni et al. (2016) by developing and fielding an online survey tool. Additionally, the thesis should investigate the willingness to share historical location data (e.g., a Google Maps timeline) for different purposes and at different granularities, as historical location data can be of a great value for development and evaluation of new location-based services.

    Specifically, this Master thesis has three main tasks:

    1. Analyze, summarize, and incorporate recent work in the area of location sharing into the existing related work section of Scipioni et al. (2016).
    2. Revise and extend an existing survey instrument draft for validating the LSAM for both real-time and historic location sharing.
    3. Use the survey tool to perform a study and analyze the results.

    The main challenge of the work will be to design and field the survey tool using a commercial survey service (e.g., Qualtrics, Prolific, TestingTime) and to analyze the results.

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