The quest for location-privacy in opportunistic mobile social networks
Sameh Zakhary, Milena Radenkovic, Abderrahim Benslimane · 2013
Location-tracking is a major privacy problem, especially with high penetration of smart-phones and GPS-enabled devices around the world. In this paper, we propose a Hybrid and Social-aware Location-Privacy in Opportunistic mobile social networks (HSLPO), a collaborative and distributed obfuscation protocol that offers location-privacy k-anonymity. HSLPO discovers the users' own social network and use it to obfuscate requests and hide the original sender's location from the Location based service (LBS) while minimizing the overhead needed to perform obfuscation. We performed extensive simulations over a map-based pseudo realistic environment to compare HSLPO to exiting protocols. Results show that HSLPO can reach higher location-privacy levels and quality of service, in term of success ratio, than other protocols while maintaining low overheads.