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City-wide free WiFi is one of the most common initiatives of smart city infrastructures. While city-wide free WiFi services are not subject to privacy-focused regulations and appeal to a broader demographic, how users perceive privacy in such services is unknown. This study explores perspectives of users in the United States regarding the privacy practices of such services as well as their expectations. We conducted surveys with 199 participants of US, consisting of those who had used such services (i.e., experienced users, n=99) and those who had not (i.e., potential users, n=100), assessing their satisfaction with the services, perceptions regarding data privacy practices of city-wide free WiFi services, and general expectations of privacy. We identify 14 key findings by analyzing the responses from participants. We found that participants are aware of the data collection and data sharing by the WiFi services and are uncomfortable with both but are still inclined to use the services as the need for WiFi outweighs privacy, as well as because of the significant trust they place in the services due to their non-profit and government-run nature. Our analysis provides actionable takeaways for researchers and practitioners, arguing for long-term privacy gains through a regulatory approach that treats city-wide WiFi as a utility, given the trust consumers place in it, and the overall tendency of consumers to trade-off privacy for WiFi access in this context.
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Auxiliary Location-Based Services for Persons with Disabilities: What do City Planners and Non-Profit Agencies Think?
Deploying auxiliary location-based services to complement GPS-based services has been a recent phenomenon to enable greater independence in navigation and wayfinding for persons with disabilities in unfamiliar environments. All work in this domain has been technical in nature with little known about the perceptions of city planners and non-profit agencies about the long-term sustainability and impact of such technologies on their communities. This work presents results and insights from a study on the perceptions of both city planners and non-profit agency personnel from a medium-sized city in the U.S.A about the importance of auxiliary location-based services and their potential impact.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1737433
- PAR ID:
- 10123205
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 621 to 623
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3308561.3354631
