Negotiating Everyday Geodata: A User-Centered Typology of Geovisibility Practices on Digital Platforms in China

This study examines how users classify, interpret, and manage geodata within platform-mediated conditions of visibility in China. Based on in-depth interviews with active users of major digital platforms, it adopts a geomedia-informed, user-centered perspective to identify recurring patterns in users’ understandings and practices of diverse forms of geodata. The findings develop a typology of compulsory, essential, and voluntary geodata, corresponding respectively to enforced, negotiated, and conditionally autonomous geovisibility. The study conceptualizes geovisibility as a process in which users become differently visible across platform settings, shaped by platform requirements, service functions, interface settings, and situated responses. By shifting attention from individual disclosure decisions to the conditions under which location visibility is imposed, adjusted, or selectively managed, the study advances geomedia research and contributes to broader debates on location privacy. It also offers implications for differentiated geodata controls, privacy literacy, and platform design in China and other platformized contexts.