Privacy and Gender: Reviewing Women’s Attitudes Toward Privacy in the Context of Intelligent Transportation Systems and Location-Based Services

Citation:

Cottrill, Caitlin D., and Piyushimita (Vonu) Thakuriah. 2011. “Privacy and Gender: Reviewing Women’s Attitudes Toward Privacy in the Context of Intelligent Transportation Systems and Location-Based Services.” In Women’s Issues in Transportation: Summary of the 4th International Conference, Vol. 2: Technical Papers, 117-26. Washington, DC: Transportation Research Board of the National Academies.

Authors: Caitlin D. Cottrill , Piyushimita (Vonu) Thakuriah

Abstract:

Limited previous research has shown that women value online privacy more than men, potentially influencing their online behavior or willingness to reveal personal data online. New generations of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and location-based services (LBS) technologies depend on the input of personalized and localized information to give, potentially, information that may uniquely address women’s complex travel patterns, but which may raise locational privacy concerns for women and cause them to hesitate to share the needed information. This paper examines gender differences in the propensity to reveal the potentially sensitive information necessary to make ITS and LBS highly personalized to individual travelers. The authors develop privacy indicators based on refusals to answer sociodemographic and location questions in a household travel survey to evaluate whether women have a significantly different attitude toward willingness to share data related to position and personal identifiers compared with men. The results show that gender differences regarding privacy preferences are not statistically significant. However, this result is inconclusive because the survey overall achieved low response rates and participating households may already be self-selected into being open about divulging sensitive travel and locational information.

Topics: Gender, Infrastructure, Information & Communication Technologies, Transportation, Security

Year: 2011