Who's Viewed You? The Impact of Feedback in a Mobile Location Sharing System

Feedback is viewed as an essential element of ubiquitous computing systems in the HCI literature for helping people manage their privacy. However, the success of online social networks and existing commercial systems for mobile location sharing which do not incorporate feedback would seem to call the importance of feedback into question. The authors investigated this issue in the context of a mobile location sharing system. Specifically, they report on the findings of a field deployment of Locyoution, a mobile location sharing system. In their study, (n = 56), one group was given feedback in the form of a history of location requests, and a second group was given no feedback at all.