LYLO – Exploring Disclosed Configurations for Inter-Personal Location Sharing

BSTRACT Continuous location sharing (CLS) can foster intimacy, for example, for couples in long-distance relationships. However, turning off CLS can then raise suspicions. To address this, we developed nuanced sharing settings in a focus group (N = 6) and implemented them to moderate CLS in an Android app. Crucially, the app also discloses each person’s current sharing settings to the partner. In a 16-day field study, four couples interacted with our app and the disclosed configurations, confirming the disclosure’s positive effect on transparency. However, features obfuscating the location were considered superfluous, as participants preferred sharing their location exactly or not at all. While participants overall appreciated having the configuration options, changes in their partners’ configurations raised questions about their motivations. Instead, participants would adjust the configuration for different intimacy levels (colleague vs. partner) rather than different activities when using CLS with the same person.