FindYou: A Personal Location Privacy Auditing Tool

Christopher J. Riederer, Daniel Echickson, Stephanie Huang, Augustin Chaintreau

Abstract: The ubiquitous availability of location data to smartphone apps and online social networks has caused the collection of such information to grow at an unprecedented rate. However, the discriminative power and potential uses of this data collection is not always clear to the end user. In this work, we present FindYou, a web-based application that gives users the ability to perform a location data privacy audit. FindYou lets users import and visualize the location data collected by popular web services in order to understand what these companies know or can easily infer about them. Additionally, FindYou gives users the option to donate their data to the scientific community, creating new mobile datasets linked to user properties that will be open to use by academic institutions. We hope that FindYou will increase awareness of the privacy issues surrounding the collection and use of location data, the potential problem of "digital red-lining", and also create valuable new datasets with the full informed consent of interested users.