The Study Of Influencing Factors That Affect LBS Users’ Privacy Concern In Social Apps

The development of Internet and mobile communication technology enables LBS(Location-Based Services) to be gradually integrated into people’s lives. The constant disclosure of LBS users’ geographical location information gives rise to attention to privacy disclosure, which eventualy affects the users’ continuance on the product. At present, the researches on LBS privacy concern in the filed of Information System are mainly focused on technology level, and very few explorations are conducted from users’ perspective. This study plans to solve these problems: The rules, features, motives and demands while users are using LBS; The factors that affect the usage of LBS; The factors that affect users’ LBS privacy concern and how they work. In this context, we conduct a two-stage research. On first stage, we carries through an exploratory study on 8 social app sample users, aims at their privacy concern while using LBS, uses UCD(user-centered design) for reference, combines with online data analysis, interviews and logs, so as to ascertain the influence factors of LBS privacy concern. On the second stage, we carries through confirmatory study based on the previous stage, we put forward hypotheses through literature and presents concept model of LBS users’ privacy concern, collects data through questionnaires, then verify the model with Visual PLS. In the end, we find out 10 factors in three dimensions influence LBS privacy concern as well as the relationships among them.From the first stage, we conclude that certain privacy concern is existed while users are using LBS, and through the establishment of user roles, we extract several influence factors and classify them as Service Quality of LBS, Perceived Risk, and Trust. From the second stage, we find out that all hypotheses are significantly supported, which means factors concluded from exploratory study all affect LBS privacy concern to a certain extent, and we can bring down privacy concern through approaches from three dimensions Service Quality of LBS, Perceived Risk and Trust. This research breaks the traditional anonymous framework, conducts the whole investigation on LBS based on reality, which has theoretical significance for comprehensively understanding LBS users’ privacy concern, also has guiding significance for the development and design of LBS functions.