Implications of smartphone usage on privacy and spatial cognition: academic literature and public perceptions Britta Ricker • Nadine Schuurman • Fritz Kessler Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 Abstract The exponential adoption of smartphones affords the general public access to tools (sensors) that were once only available to highly trained scientists and geospatial technicians. This provides more people with opportunities to contribute and consume infor- mation relevant to their current location. Geographers have been applying critical theory to examine privacy implications associated with constant locational aware smartphone usage while applied researchers are mea- suring spatial cognitive abilities using empirically bound approaches. What remains unknown is how smartphone users perceive implications associated with privacy and spatial cognitive abilities as a result of smartphone use for location based queries. An online survey was administered to collect perceptions related to these issues from the general smartphone- using public. It was found that while participants were mindful of privacy concerns associated with smart- phone use, they reported that perceived benefits of smartphone use outweigh associated costs. Addition- ally, the majority of the participants found that their smartphones provided them with confidence in way- finding tasks rather than hindering them as some literature suggests. Through this study we aim to describe how a lack of understanding of the general publics’ perceptions of smartphone usage may be limiting contemporary theory and practice within volunteered geographic information and location based services related research associated with geography. Keywords Volunteered geographic information Á Location based services Á Mobile Á Smartphone Á Wayfinding Introduction Geographers are particularly interested in the public’s use of smartphones for spatial data collection and dissemination. Smartphones are mobile phones that contain additional sensors providing applications, which afford their end user with locational informa- tion, Internet access, and other capabilities. Geogra- phers are hopeful that the use of mobile smartphones will be used to reveal and impart knowledge about spatial phenomena through volunteered geographic information (VGI) combined with location based services (LBS) and associated interactive maps B. Ricker (&) Á N. Schuurman Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada e-mail: bricker0@uw.edu B. Ricker Department of Urban Studies, University of Washington Tacoma, Tacoma, WA, USA F. Kessler Frostburg State University, Frostburg, MD, USA 123 GeoJournal DOI 10.1007/s10708-014-9568-4