# Toward Addressing Location Privacy Issues: New Affiliations with Social and Location Attributes
## 3 Results
### Identifying User's Identity--Privacy Threats in Geolocation Apps/Services  
Another important issue raised by a number of papers is how to address threats related to a user's identification through the disclosure of their geolocation information by malicious attackers. [PERSON] and [PERSON] and [PERSON] (2018) define privacy using [PERSON]'s definition: \"Privacy is the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others\" (p. 2), before moving to location privacy, which can be defined as \"a special type of information privacy which concerns the claim of individuals to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent location information about them is communicated to others\" (p. 2). The authors argue that location awareness provides a specific context to users' actions. In other words, that context can endow users with a number of additional characteristics, such as social characteristics. The paper reviews a number of location privacy protection mechanisms that are not advised to be used individually; as a consequence, the authors propose a combination of approaches, such as regulation, privacy policies, anonymity, and obfuscation. Except for discussing the prerequisites under which social characteristics are expected to be shared, this paper underlines the social characteristics that provide context to the protection of location services. Users expect their location information to be handled in a way that matches their social characteristics. In [PERSON] et al. (2018), [PERSON], [PERSON], [PERSON], [PERSON] and [PERSON] review methods used in addressing users' location privacy concerns, such as cryptography, anonymity, obfuscation, and caching. However, the study underlines two basic obstacles in addressing location privacy, primarily due to the difficulty in making comparisons between location privacy preservation mechanisms and the incompatibility between theory and real social media practice. The authors also identify two potential types of attacks: identity and localization attack. The paper goes a step further and defines location privacy as a subcategory of information privacy by focusing on \"the ability of an individual to move in public space with the expectation that under normal circumstances, their location will not be systematically and secretly recorded for later use\" (p. 4). In other words, the user is willing to sacrifice part of his/her privacy while joining the public sphere as far as the user feels that the sensitive personal information will not be collected or used in a suspicious way. Another key aspect of the aforementioned study is that the representation of location information can be analyzed as a three-dimensional concept, which apart from a specific or abstract location description will also include a user's identity, spatial information (position), and temporal information (time). The study enumerates the distinctive characteristics of location information; namely, it concludes that it is massive, highly correlated, dynamic, and unequal in importance. Having stressed the importance of location information in disclosing users' identity, it is of great importance to estimate the value of privacy in terms of an actual price, as it is carried out in the following paragraph. [PERSON], [PERSON], and [PERSON] carry out a study to focus on measuring the price of precise location information by using economic and psychology tools as a potential guide to estimate the amount that the users would be willing to pay for protecting their geolocation information [PERSON] et al. (2018). Volunteers were exposed to a 'compensation auction' to determine a price that would be sufficient in order to share their exact location information, so as to make sure that participants were going to respond truthfully. The median bid according to the results was \(\ell 10\); however, students who were traveling outside the city or who had a partner tended to bid higher.