Microsoft offers up tips, stats on location privacy

[ycy123]

There are some do's and don'ts with location sharing. Things like not publicly posting geo-tagged photos of gold bricks near open windows, or alerting the world to your extended absence are the more DCUO power levelingobvious ones. But not everyone knows these things, which is why Microsoft is sharing some tips of its own based on research it commissioned around location based services.

The 1,500-person survey, which was conducted back in December of last year, involved people in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Japan, and Germany, and will be discussed by Microsoft's Chief Privacy Officer Brendon Lynch during a panel discussion tonight at San Francisco's Churchill Club. The survey is also a larger part of Data Privacy Day, which takes place this Friday.


In a post on the company's Microsoft on the Issues blog, Lynch wrote that only 51 percent of the survey's respondents had used a location-based service before, but that 94 percent of that group found them "valuable.

Though the key concern among those who were surveyed seemed to be consent, with 84 percent saying that they were worried about services that would share location without asking. Fou percent said they'd feel better about location based services "if they could easily and clearly DCUO Cashmanage who sees their location information." To that end, Lynch said that customer notifications and consent, along with "user-friendly privacy controls" were part of the company's privacy standards.

Last year, a site called Please Rob Me famously cropped up that would aggregate geo-tagged check-ins from various check-in services and post them in a large feed in order to draw attention to the dangers of location sharing. The site has since shut its doors, saying that it was "satisfied" with the attention it had received. Though if Microsoft's survey data is any indication, there's still a large group of people that have never heard of the problem the site was trying to solve.