The role of privacy concerns, perceived benefits, and trust in citizens' acceptance of street-view image collection by local planning agencies

Street-view images are essential data sources for advanced urban analytics. Most of the street-view images that researchers utilize are commercial street views, which can be inadequate for conducting advanced urban analytics, primarily because of their limited spatial coverage and high temporal inconsistency. Thus, there has been a growing need to collect original street-view images. However, the extent to which citizens approve of the collection of street-view images remains unknown. A scientific investigation of citizens' perceptions about the new data collection method is crucial because it provides empirical evidence for successfully collecting street-view images by local planning agencies. By conducting an online survey (n = 411), we examined the relationship between people's privacy concerns, perceived benefits, trust in a local urban planning agency, and acceptance of the collection of street-view images by an urban planning agency. About 83 % of the survey participants living in the U.S. support the idea that local planning agencies collect original street-view images. The structural equation modeling (SEM) results demonstrate that perceived benefits and trust in an urban planning agency are positively associated with acceptance. Lower income is significantly associated with lower acceptance. Lastly, a significantly lower percentage of people prefer drone-based to vehicle-based image collection.