How do people perceive the disclosure risk of maps? Examining the perceived disclosure risk of maps and its implications for geoprivacy protection

ABSTRACT

This research examines how people subjectively perceive the disclosure risk of a map using original data collected in an online survey with 856 participants. The results indicate that perceived disclosure risk increases as the amount of locational information displayed on a map increases. Compared to point-based maps, perceived disclosure risk is significantly lower for kernel density maps, convex hull maps, and standard deviational ellipse maps. The results also revealed that perceived disclosure risk is affected by map scale and the presence of information of other people on a map. For geomasking methods, perceived disclosure risk decreases as aggregation level increases and as relocation distance increases. However, aggregation methods (point to polygon) are more effective in preventing the re-identification of individuals when compared to relocation methods (point to point). Lastly, the perceived disclosure risk of a map that displays socially-vulnerable people is significantly higher than that of a map that displays non-vulnerable groups. Specifically, a map displaying the private locations of elementary school students has the highest perceived disclosure risk. Based on the results, a set of geoprivacy protection guidelines for mapping people’s private locations to minimize people’s perceived disclosure risk is proposed. Implications for mapping infectious diseases like the COVID-19 are also discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Disclosure risk
• geoprivacy
• geomasking
• perception
• COVID-19
• survey

Acknowledgments

Junghwan Kim would like to thank the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Space-Time Analysis and Research (STAR) Lab members (Lirong Kou, Dong Liu, Wataru Morioka, and Shuangshuang Qiu), Yonsei University Gateway to City (GTC) Society members (Younghun Bahk, Hoyeon Hwang, Minseok Kim, and Youngjoon Kim), Soomin Kim, Rebecca Martin, Swati Rastogi, and Minsoo Sung for their helpful feedback during a pilot study. The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments, which helped improve the paper considerably. The authors are particularly grateful for the editor’s and the reviewers’ efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Supplementary material

Supplemental material for this article can be accessed here.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

Due to the nature of this research, participants of this study had not agreed that their data can be shared publicly. As a result, the data used in this study cannot be shared with or made available to others.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (BCS-2025783).