Location Based Services is tracking YOU: a Netnographic perspective on challenges and opportunities from UK consumers

Location Based Services (LBS) and electronic lifestyles (e-lifestyles) represent emergent new areas with approaches (e.g. applications [apps] and electronic activities [e-activities]) billed to change customer experiences and responses (Zhou 2012). LBS is one of the IoT megatrends requiring tracking of consumers where fine grained user information is gathered when either requesting or receiving tailored location services. Other megatrend examples include Cyborgs and Artificial Intelligence applications. As such key objectives of this study are to, a) explore consumer experiences with location-based services, b) examine how respondent perceptions (value and risk) influence response to LBS and c) uncover how context may influence individual consumer response patterns. A mono method qualitative design was adopted and 85 threads from 4 websites were sampled. Piloting of relevant sites was conducted over a period of three weeks resulting in 4 websites that contained rich threads on LBS. Despite LBS being in infancy and muted lack of awareness (see Zhou, 2012) results emerged in our study pointing to rich consumer experiences with location services. Nonetheless, there was indifference in the absence of opt in and opt out options were concerns over perceived risk (e.g. data breaches, selling of data and the covert nature of services, spam: trust transfer process. As location-based services continue to increase in sophistication, there is need for more theoretical models that offer good explanatory potentialto understand consumer response further. Our research develops further research by seminal authors providing richer insights into specific privacy concerns when using location services