Critical Success Factors of Location-Based Services

Location-based services evolved with the advancement in mobile technology and wireless technology. Researchers have studied location-based services in terms of privacy, trust, and user acceptance. Statistics suggest the percentage of location-based services users is still relatively low. Therefore, the main objective of this study was to gain a comprehensive and holistic understanding of the critical success factors of location-based services. The electronic brainstorming approach was used to gather the opinions of an expert group of practitioners, researchers, and users on the critical success factors of location-based services. Through grouping similar factors together based on past literature, 15 categories of critical success factors were developed. These 15 categories were ranked and rated according to importance. The results showed that speed, real-time or up-to-date information, cost, usefulness or benefits, and simple or ease of use are the five most important critical success factors. The results of this research highlight potential areas of research, and research and development. The results of this study also provide guidelines for practitioners to create a competitive location-based services strategy to increase consumer adoption. Advisor: Keng L. Sia

The behavioral response to Location Based Services: An examination of the influence of social and environmental benefits, and privacy

Given the importance tourism has in many economies, this research was designed to study how the social and environmental benefits of Location Based Services (LBS) in the tourism sector influence user behavior and thus contribute to sustainable development. The objective has been to study LBS as a solution that makes the deployment of tourism activities easier, more useful and improves attitudes towards it, but in a context where trust in privacy and benefits-based sustainable social and environmental development are key. To achieve this, this research identifies what could be the influence factors in the adoption of mobile applications with Location Based Services from the point of view of the tourism sector, especially if the social and environmental benefits of LBS can help improve usage behavior. We investigated the technological acceptance of LBS in tourism, using Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) as a solid model to explain its adoption. Nine hypotheses were investigatedbycarryingoutasurveyoftravelers(n=277)duringtheirvisittoSeville(Spain). Totest theconceptualmodel’shypotheses,thePartialLeastSquares(PLS)techniquewasappliedtoestimate variance-based structural equations models (SEM).The results of this study indicated that tourists are willing to accept these LBS services within a particular adoption model, where trust in privacy and social and environmental benefits are paramount

Information Visualization and Location-Based Services on Mobile Devices

With the widespread adoption of mobile devices and location-based services (LBSs), using location-based information from mobile devices has become increasingly common. However, accomplishing tasks on mobile devices remains challenging due to the complexity of location-based information and visualization constraints of mobile devices. Effective information visualization is, therefore, critical for improving user perceptions and usage. Based on theories of cognition and information visualization, we propose a novel hybrid approach that integrates presentation formats and interactivity features for information visualization. We implement the proposed approach on mobile devices and empirically evaluate it in a laboratory experiment. The results suggest that text- and map-based presentation formats significantly enhance user perceptions. Both semantic zoom and content filtering features have significant effects on perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness of mobile LBSs. Our theoretical and practical contributions, as well as plans for further testing and enhancing are discussed

Study of adoption factors in location-based services

Diese Studie untersuchte die relevanten Eigenschaften von Location-based Services, welche von prospektiven Nutzern erwartet werden, um mit der Nutzung dieser neuen Dienste zu beginnen. Dabei modellieren wir die Einflußfaktoren nach der Theorie der Diffusion von Innovationen und überprüfen diese durch eine empirische Befragung. Die Ergebnisse sind im folgenden Text dargestellt. Die wesentlichen Ergebnisse waren: • Die individuelle Nützlichkeit eines Angebots ist der stärkste Einflußfaktor auf die Adoption. • Überzeugende Datenschutzkonzepte stehen an zweiter Stelle. • Benutzerergonomie bei der Dienstenutzung sowie die leichte Verständlichkeit und Kommunizierbarkeit der Dienste und ihrer Anwendung sind wesentlich. Eine Einführung in die Diffusionstheorie und weitere Details zur Studie finden Sie im Text.This survey verified factors that significantly influence user adoption of innovative location-based services. More than 400 participants were asked. The most important resulting factors were found to be: * Usefulness of the product * privacy protection * Ergonomy and usability issues The text also presents a brief intoduction into diffusion theory

Mobile Services in Hubei: Adoption Model and Empirical Analysis

Mobile Commerce has developed rapidly in China with the characters of ubiquity, location relevance, convenience and personalization. The researches on technology, value chain, business models, user adoption have become a hot topic among academics. Based on the classical Davis’ TAM theory and the expansions of it, and the predecessors\u27 research on perceived enjoyment and perceived cost, this study builds an adoption model of Mobile value-added services in Hubei Province. In the variety of individual mobile value-added business, four most commonly used services are extracted in this study ,including Mobile Instant Message, Multimedia Messaging Service, WAP Web browse and Multi-media Downloads to represent the overall situation. According to the result of empirical analysis based on valid data of questionnaires, perceived enjoyment and perceived cost are the most influential factors. Six of the seven hypotheses in this study are verified

PrivCheck: Privacy-Preserving Check-in Data Publishing for Personalized Location Based Services

International audienceWith the widespread adoption of smartphones, we have observed an increasing popularity of Location-Based Services (LBSs) in the past decade. To improve user experience, LBSs often provide personalized recommendations to users by mining their activity (i.e., check-in) data from location-based social networks. However, releasing user check-in data makes users vulnerable to inference attacks, as private data (e.g., gender) can often be inferred from the users'check-in data. In this paper, we propose PrivCheck, a customizable and continuous privacy-preserving check-in data publishing framework providing users with continuous privacy protection against inference attacks. The key idea of PrivCheck is to obfuscate user check-in data such that the privacy leakage of user-specified private data is minimized under a given data distortion budget, which ensures the utility of the obfuscated data to empower personalized LBSs. Since users often give LBS providers access to both their historical check-in data and future check-in streams, we develop two data obfuscation methods for historical and online check-in publishing, respectively. An empirical evaluation on two real-world datasets shows that our framework can efficiently provide effective and continuous protection of user-specified private data, while still preserving the utility of the obfuscated data for personalized LBS

Internet Localization of Multi-Party Relay Users: Inherent Friction Between Internet Services and User Privacy

Internet privacy is increasingly important on the modern Internet. Users are looking to control the trail of data that they leave behind on the systems that they interact with. Multi-Party Relay (MPR) architectures lower the traditional barriers to adoption of privacy enhancing technologies on the Internet. MPRs are unique from legacy architectures in that they are able to offer privacy guarantees without paying significant performance penalties. Apple's iCloud Private Relay is a recently deployed MPR service, creating the potential for widespread consumer adoption of the architecture. However, many current Internet-scale systems are designed based on assumptions that may no longer hold for users of privacy enhancing systems like Private Relay. There are inherent tensions between systems that rely on data about users -- estimated location of a user based on their IP address, for example -- and the trend towards a more private Internet. This work studies a core function that is widely used to control network and application behavior, IP geolocation, in the context of iCloud Private Relay usage. We study the location accuracy of popular IP geolocation services compared against the published location dataset that Apple publicly releases to explicitly aid in geolocating PR users. We characterize geolocation service performance across a number of dimensions, including different countries, IP version, infrastructure provider, and time. Our findings lead us to conclude that existing approaches to IP geolocation (e.g., frequently updated databases) perform inadequately for users of the MPR architecture. For example, we find median location errors >1,000 miles in some countries for IPv4 addresses using IP2Location. Our findings lead us to conclude that new, privacy-focused, techniques for inferring user location may be required as privacy becomes a default user expectation on the Internet

Intentions to Use Location-Based Services: Refining a Predictive Model and Understanding Contexts of Use

This thesis is concerned with the processes involved in the perception, adoption and use of location-based services (LBS). Location-based services are able to pinpoint the geographical position of an individual and are most often deployed on mobile devices. The capability for LBS to be integrated into other systems such as social networking sites is also growing. The focus of current LBS research is on the development of security measures to protect privacy. The actual privacy concerns of real LBS users, however, have not been considered. The work in this thesis examines location-based services from a user perspective. A previously untested predictive model of LBS was assessed, and shown to be unsuited to account for intentions to use the technology in a workplace setting. A revised and improved model is proposed that suggests four factors account for intentions: perceived usefulness, trust of the LBS provider, disclosure to employer and trust of the employer. This research investigated the types of location information that might be disclosed when using LBS, who the recipients might be, and how people categorise location information into meaningful clusters. Results showed that people have explicit LBS preferences, with the receiver of information and context playing a large role in determining disclosure. Three qualitative case studies aimed to understand implications of LBS use with different populations. Participants raised concerns about trustworthiness of their employer and knowledge of LBS providers, providing support for the theoretical model. These case studies suggest LBS could also successfully be applied to alternate user groups. These findings have important implications for LBS providers and industry. People have a desire to know who the LBS provider is and what role they will play. Making these issues explicit should improve trust and develop the user-LBS provider relationship. When implementing LBS in the workplace, consultation with employees and providing clear information may enhance trust of the employer

Examining the Determinants of Mobile Location-based Services’ Continuance

The continuance of use is an important topic of IS research. However, in the past, many researchers have focused on adoption rather than IS continuance. Studying continuance is of equal importance, because if use does not persist, this may limit the revenues of the provider. This is particularly true for consumer-oriented services, which rely on advertising, or subscription-based revenue models. In this paper, we investigate the determinants of location-based services (LBS) continuance as a relevant case study for the examination of IS continuance generally. A research model is developed and empirically tested through a survey of a representative sample in Germany. The proposed model builds on and extends the Limayem et al. model of IS continuance. Our analysis highlights the importance of habit and emotion in LBS continuance. The results indicate that habit has a stronger predictive power than continuance intentions for LBS continuance and that emotions are an important driver for user satisfaction with LBS