Using a social informatics framework to study the effects of location-based social networking on relationships between people: A review of literature

Abstract

Location based social networking (LBSN) applications are part of a new suite of emerging social networking tools that run on the Web 2.0 platform. LBSN is the convergence between location based services (LBS) and online social networking (OSN). LBSN applications offer users the ability to look up the location of another "friend" remotely using a smart phone, desktop or other device, anytime and anywhere. Users invite their friends to participate in LBSN and there is a process of consent that follows. Friends have the ability to alter their privacy settings to allow their location to be monitored by another at differing levels of accuracy (e.g. suburb, pinpoint at the street address level, or manual location entry). This paper explores the impact of LBSN upon society, especially upon trust between friends. The study used focus groups to collect data, and a qualitative approach towards analysis. The paper concludes that while there are a great many positive uses of LBSN, there are some significant problems with current applications, and that better design is required to ensure that these technologies are not exploited against a user to commit harm.

How Is the Mobile Internet Different? Search Costs and Local Activities

“…For example, they include searches for local news, weather or sports reports, navigation, friend-finder services, and location-based gaming (Mountain et al 2009). Researchers studying such services have examined reasons people use FourSquare (Lindqvist et al 2011), privacy concerns in location-sharing applications (Barkuus and Dey 2003), and the effects of location-based services on the relationships between people (Fusco et al 2010). Implicit in these studies is the suggestion that the mobile Internet is an important driver of the rise of location-based services.…”

Updating Road Networks by Local Renewal from GPS Trajectories

“…Nascent approaches for collecting tracking data were a major boost to the availability of trajectories and could potentially turn everyone into a data provider or mapmaker using mobile devices with positioning technologies and by increasing LBSN (location-based social networking, [1,2]). Most LBSN websites provide people with GPS-enabled mobile devices with a set of tools with which they can collect and share GPS traces of where they have been in a simple manner.…”

Location Privacy Online : China, The Netherlands and South Korea

“…The number of LBSN providers has explosively increased in the past few years. There were more than 100 LBSN applications in 2010 [4]. The great popularity of LBS, however, carries the danger of user location privacy breaches due to location information disclosure.…”