An Empirical Investigation of Attitude towards Location-aware Social Network Service

Anders Kofod-Petersen, Per Anton Gransæther and John Krogstie
Department of Computer and Information Science, 
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) 
Sem Sælandsvei 7-9
NO-7491 Trondheim
{anderpe|-----|krogstie}@idi.ntnu.no

There is currently an abundance of social network service 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 in a larger scale. However, some reservations in particular with 
regard to privacy are uncovered.