Friendship–based location privacy in Mobile Social Networks. (1st February 2012)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Chang, Wei; Wu, Jie; Tan, Chiu C.
• Is Part Of: International journal of security and networks. Volume 6:Number 4(2011)
• Page Start: 226
• Page End: 236
• Publication Date: 2012-02-01
• Subjects: closeness -- inference attacks -- location privacy -- MSNs -- mobile social networks -- trajectory estimation -- privacy protection -- simulation -- network security; Computer networks -- Security measures -- Periodicals; 005.805
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1747-8405

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.