Title: Friendship-based location privacy in Mobile Social Networks

Authors: Wei Chang; Jie Wu; Chiu C. Tan

Addresses: Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA. ' Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA. ' Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA

Abstract: Location privacy in Mobile Social Networks (MSNs) has generated significant interest in recent years, with many proposed methods to address the problem. Commercial solutions to this problem have suggested designing better ways for users to determine when to report their locations, while academic researchers have proposed solutions that involve deploying trusted third party servers to protect user privacy. In this paper, we showed that simply omitting location updates does not provide adequate privacy protections, especially in situations where the friendship relationships between users are known. We proposed a fake location update algorithm that allows a user to protect his privacy. A key feature of our approach is that it can be adopted without the use of any third party services, making them more practical. We evaluate our approach using extensive simulation experiments.

Keywords: closeness; inference attacks; location privacy; MSNs; mobile social networks; trajectory estimation; privacy protection; simulation; network security.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSN.2011.045230

International Journal of Security and Networks, 2011 Vol.6 No.4, pp.226 - 236

Published online: 31 Jan 2012 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article