Is My Information Private? Geo-Privacy In the World of Social Media

Privacy has always been a public concern. It can be dated back to media privacy of 1361 that was enacted to protect people from peeping toms in England. In 19th century, privacy became a hot issue with the arrival of modern photography and printing press that enabled easy reporting of personal information and pictures, automated data processing to catalog citizens during World War II, and record keeping Systems in the U.S. These actions led to the enactment of a number of privacy policies, specifically, focusing on data protection - mis-use of data and/or malicious access of data by unauthorized persons. In this era of the Internet, ubiquitous computing combined with the growth of the geo-spatial and the Information and Communication Technology industries has made it possible for anyone to access personal and location information of another person anytime and anywhere. For instance, GeoAPI of Twitter (a social media service) can help track the movement of a person over space and time. Despite having regulatory policies, it is possible to extract location information of a person by using VGI (Volunteered Geographic Information) and CGI (Contributed Geographic Information) available from social media sites. This study explores the extent to which location information obtained from social media sites are reliable and useful and are influenced by an individual\u27s concern and knowledge of privacy