Research About Protecting Mobile Location-based Services Users' Geography Information

With the popularization of mobile devices and the maturity of location technology,mobile scenario-based services have been widely used in online and offline,such as social networking,e-commerce,life service and so on.Because the background management of mobile portable device keeps capturing user's geographical position,the application software downloaded and installed on mobile devices is capable of reading user's position information.In this condition,though online mobile service meets user's needs,it makes the user's position information be in the danger of information leakage and illegal use.This paper reviews the current situation of commercial use and legal protection of users' location information in mobile location services.Through related research literature,it is found that the existing research mostly focused on the network users'privacy concerns and the legal regulation of personal information utilization,lacking of theoretical attention to location information rules.Starting from the current situation in China,this paper takes four representative network service providers,Baidu Map,Drop-Drip Taxi,Metro and Wechat as the entry point,and finds many problems in their privacy policies or privacy declarations.These problems are originated from the business model of "Flow Economy" in the Internet industry,which also results in the inevitability of personal information being used by network companies.Meanwhile,the provisions to protect location data in the existing Civil Law,Criminal Law and industry norms are quite out of touch with the actual situation,which is mainly rooted in two deficiencies:the unclear interpretation of the word"personal information" in Criminal Law as well as the lack of distinction between personal sensitive information and personal general information.In the part of empirical research,this paper adopted the research method of questionnaire survey,according to the research idea of"industry and legal issues in the process of using and protecting location information-privacy perception of location information-sensitive perception of location information".In a word,this paper focuses on the user's geographic location data,which is an significant issue with the high-speed development of mobile network services at this stage,aiming to explore bow to balance the usability and protectiveness of user's geographic location data.According to the results of questionnaires,privacy calculus theory was integrated into a three-factor model,which includes "perceived privacy benefits","perceived privacy control"and"perceived privacy risk".Based on the questionnaire data of the self-made scale,different groups of control variables,such as gender,age,educational level and occupation,were analyzed to exhibit user's privacy perceptive mechanism when using LBS services.The results of the questionnaire show that although there are slight differences among different gender and age groups,users generally have a high degree of perceived risk and perceived control with a low level of perceived benefits.The measurement of location information sensitivity is also worth studying.This paper focuses on how to measure the word"sensitivity"from the perspective of social psychology.Through the analysis of the survey data of the Geography Location Information Sensitivity Questionnaire,it is found that the Internet users believed that topics involving body,sex and value judgment are generally more sensitive than usual,but the sensitivity degree of the last of the three varied from person to person.In addition,some netizens show a certain degree of privacy "desensitization effect"under the influence of decades of network environment,and the sensitive emotions have gradually deviated from unreasonable to rational.However,in any case,the personal online comprehensive information supported by big data technology and constructed under the jigsaw effect are highly sensitive.On the basis of the above findings,this paper gives practical advice on how to regulate enterprises' behavior of collection and use of users' location information.It points out that we should not only improve existing Privacy Policies&Declarations as well as distinguish sensitive location information from general information in legislation,but also set up a good industry checks and balances mechanism,such as building a third-party platform and carrying out objective research.Credit rating and data agency services play a restrictive role for enterprises.In a word,this paper aims to achieve a balance between the protection and utilization of users' location information,and to achieve a rational dialogue between network providers/service providers and users.