I am at home: Spatial Privacy Concerns with Social Media Check-ins

Inclusion of Location Based Services (LBS) on social media including geo-tagging, and check-ins has been on the rise. Users share their location information, motivated by self-expression and socialization, as well as to improve their understanding about places. However, sharing of location information develops an increased potential for spatial privacy violations. Along with the advances in LBS, the developments in the field of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) including easy to use web-maps and reverse geocoding services, provide researchers as well as others to analyze and visualize spatial footprints generated by LBS. This study will use geo-tagged check-in data from the microblogging platform Twitter, along with easy to use GIS based tools to demonstrate spatial privacy issues created due to online check-ins. Apart from demonstrating the spatial privacy vulnerabilities, we also analyze the spatial privacy issues based on the privacy policy documents. Finally, we provide suggestions to improve spatial privacy based on policies, and algorithmic techniques.