General Area or Approximate Location?: How People Understand Location Permissions.

ABSTRACTMore than half of American adults use smartphones and about two thirds of them use location-based services. On Android smartphones, these location-based services are implemented by apps. Android phones provide two location-related permissions: "precise" location and "approximate" location. In this paper, we present an online survey of 106 Android users to investigate how people understand location descriptions related to their apps. Our results suggest that most participants considered the "precise" location to mean their exact location and the "approximate" location as a general area. This mental model of the "approximate" location seems to allay people's privacy concerns related to their apps. However, after participants were shown the ground truth of how accurate "approximate" location actually is, twice as many participants no longer thought "approximate" location offered enough protection, compared to before showing the ground truth. Our results indicate that the location permissions might mislead smartphone users about the privacy protections the apps are providing.