Exploring Ideas of Geoprivacy Through Social Media: Facebook as a Case Study

The general public is blissfully unaware of how social media erodes their geo-privacy. We present research exploring people’s awareness of how private data can be used to generate geographical profiles. We created a web-based tool for explorative data analysis (EDAMS), which was used to expose our participants to their visualized digital Facebook history. Though users were aware of privacy issues, we found that the aspects of location and geography related to privacy (geoprivacy) were for most of our interviewees unknown. Acknowledging the role of GDPR we believe there is a strong argument in favour of increased efforts towards education (making available open-source visualisation tools), in order to raise awareness of geoprivacy issues when generating and sharing social media content.