Abstract

Many location-sharing systems have been developed over the past 20 years, and only recently have these systems started to be adopted by consumers. One of the major successes so far in terms of user-adoption is Foursquare, which reports having ca. 7.5 million users as of March 2011. We studied both qualitatively and quantitatively how and why people use Foursquare, and how they manage their privacy. We will report on our user studies and surprising uses of Foursquare. Furthermore, we will discuss our ongoing work in using context-awareness and location sharing to nudge people not to use their mobile phones while driving.

Speaker’s bio: Janne Lindqvist is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Janne works at the intersection of mobile computing, systems security and human-computer interaction. His current projects include usable privacy interfaces for mobile phones, context-aware mobile mashups, and mitigating problems with mobile phone usage while driving. Before joining the academia, Janne co-founded a wireless networks company, Radionet, which was represented in 24 countries before being sold to Florida-based Airspan Networks during 2005.