Title of Project:

A new era of location

Topic:

I will be doing my research on how the use of GPS is perceived. Facebook users spend millions of ours a day updating their status, playing games, etc. Yelp is the most popular review website on the Internet today. Instagram has become a way of communicating by posting pictures online. A big feature these all contain is GPS. I believe this feature used on applications such as these has lowered their privacy. However, in this social media age, is that what users want? Many people enjoy sharing their lives through websites and apps. Has it gone too far? GPS allows anyone to see where you at that same time. For instance, someone who has access to view your check-ins can easily find you when by using the “friends nearby” option. This feature gives power to those whom you may not want to share such information with.

Research Question:

How do smart phones users perceive their phones GPS functionality?

How you gathered your data, challenges you faced, things you learned about research

I used two different methods in order to collect my data. My quantitative method consisted of a survey I administered on Facebook using Surveymonkey. This was a short six question survey. I received over 120 responses but was only able to collect data on 50 of the surveys. The qualitative method was interviews. Five different people were asked 10 questions with 2 probes. I found the coding to be very tedious, but not challenging. However, I found it very difficult to meet with my interviewees. Since they’re also students at SJSU, I couldn’t find a time that worked for both of us. This forced me to be behind on my coding for the qualitative portion of my data collection. I learned how hard it can be to stick to a schedule, especially when coding is needed

Discussion

I received over 100 completed surveys, but coded 50 of them. I also recorded 5 different interviews with a set of 10 questions and 2 probes for each of those questions. I started out by asking the gender and age of the participants. This gave me a starting point of how those two categories affect one’s perception of GPS. Furthermore, for my interview questions, I went into great depth about the type of phone used and how long they having been using it. I will go into greater detail for both methods in the following paragraphs.

Naturally, there was quite a bit of repetition in the survey results. The gender was almost an even split, 51% women 49% men. Ages ranged from as young as 19 to as old as 60. I found that the majority of the users primarily used the Facebook app. For the Instagram users, I found that all of them did not have privacy issues. Instead, they all embraced the fact that other users would know where they were taking the picture. Erickson(2010) had the same result in her study, finding that apps with similar uses have very different results depending on the interface and users. This was an interesting find since most of the Facebook users also posted pictures on their wall but wished to keep it a little more private.

Another connection I found was that the older participants found privacy a bigger issue than the younger participants did. This proves that there is a generational gap that even the newest technologies cannot bridge. Parallel to Gazzard(2011), I found many different way in which GPS is changing the definition of location. Many of the younger participants felt that there are very few privacy boundary issues, especially when sharing you location using an app. I wasn’t surprised to see these results.

The interviews went much deeper than the surveys did.  Since I was able to probe and actually have a conversation with the participants, I found out that there were certain tendencies avid Facebook users had. For instance, they would often take a picture, then tag whoever was in that picture. While a couple of my participants were the ones taking the picture, the others were the victims of unwanted tags. Those victims also said they didn’t know how to turn off tagging without permission on their phone, so they had to log on their computer to turn that option off. To elaborate on that point, those who tagged their friends in pictures had no problems with privacy invasion, while the others had an intermediate to major problem with it.

Every single one of the participants interviewed did not know about all of the apps on their phone that were GPS enabled. I believe this is due to very general knowledge of smart phones and the apps that come with it. Many times, they had their GPS on without even knowing it. The only way to tell is the little arrow on the top of the phone, which isn’t the first thing they always looked for. Another interesting result I found was that all of the participants found it difficult to find out to switch the GPS function on and off, since it drains battery when it’s on. Since there are many apps that use GPS, it was impossible to go through their phone to see how easy it was to switch that function on and off.

After collecting the data for each method, I found similar results. Age and the most used app were two factors that resulted in how privacy using GPS was perceived. GPS is a life-changing tool that can be beneficial to those who use it to its full potential, but may be a burden for those who don’t want those features. My conclusion is that showing you location on social media apps can result in a popularity contest. The older users really didn’t want their location shown, so they found GPS was a major invasion of their privacy.

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