User perspective of privacy in telematics
The majority of telematics services require the user to disclose their location to gain access to these services. Personally-identifiable geographic location is highly informative and sensitive data. A real possibility of its abuse raises serious privacy concerns. Precise location information can provide a clue about an individual’s identity and his/her social activity. Such privacy concern can threaten human rights in general and the success of telematics applications in particular. So far, the privacy research has been speculative about an individual’s privacy perspective; therefore it is important to quantify user expectations and attitude about location privacy. This analysis would help in designing privacy-aware telematics where privacy requirements are obtained from end-users’ perspective. In this paper, an online survey to answer questions about consumers’ privacy has been conducted and presented. The target audience taking the survey is familiar with a range of telematics services. A general section of the survey aims to investigate user preferences about the control of their location privacy and their trust in service providers. A detailed section is dedicated to hypothetical (yet probable) scenarios of the misuse of location information and analyses users’ responses. Furthermore consumers’ willingness to have “privacy by design” systems was investigated and compared with their acceptance to control the variability of disclosure of their location information in exchange for incentives. The results of this detailed survey are presented in this research and would assist in understanding the attitudes and behaviours of the general users about the notion of location privacy. To increase the acceptance of telematics, it is essential to have inherent privacy preserving systems which are modeled on the basis of end-users expectations. Consequently, the results of this survey would prove pivotal in further advancing telematics-related privacy research.