ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Comput. Sci.
Sec. Computer Security
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomp.2025.1568179
Awareness of Privacy and Data Collection: Exploring Privacy Policy Effectiveness in Google Maps
Provisionally accepted
Claudia Raibulet1*
Kevin Wang2- 1University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy
- 2VU Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands, Netherlands
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Concerns over privacy and data collection have become increasingly important since software is everywhere. Apps such as Google Maps collect data on users' whereabouts, interests, habits, and more. Data collection practices are typically delivered through a privacy policy. To evaluate the effectiveness of privacy policies, we focus on Google Maps as a concrete and widely used app example.Our study explores user perspectives on privacy concerning the Google Maps app, and combines them with prior research to assess user awareness of data collection and privacy. To achieve our objective, we use a survey containing 19 questions (aligned with the themes explored in the state of the art, i.e., privacy policy awareness, users' habits regarding privacy, the effectiveness of privacy policies). The sampling strategy is a convenience one to receive the greatest number of responses. The received answers are analyzed by focusing on the readabil-ity and understandability of privacy policies. The output indicates that privacy policies are complex, require a significant amount of time to be read, hard to understand by most of the users, and, hence, ignored by most of the users. The various reasons why privacy policies are ineffective and what causes users to avoid reading them are summarized and discussed. Potential solutions to the inefficacy of privacy policies are outlined and areas/hints for further research are revealed.
Keywords: Awareness, Data Collection, Google maps, Mobile apps, Policy effectiveness, Privacy
Received: 30 Jan 2025; Accepted: 12 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Raibulet and Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Claudia Raibulet, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.