Protecting privacy for group nearest neighbor queries with crowdsourced data and computing
Tanzima Hashem, Mohammed Eunus Ali, Lars Kulik, Egemen Tanin, Anthony Quattrone · 2013
User privacy in location-based services (LBSs) has become an important research area. We introduce a new direction to protect user privacy that evaluates LBSs with crowdsourced data and computation and eliminates the role of a location-based service provider. We focus on the group nearest neighbor (GNN) query that allows a group to meet at their nearest point of interest such as a restaurant that minimizes the total or maximum distance of the group. We develop a crowdsource-based approach, called PrivateMeetUp, to evaluate GNN queries in a privacy preserving manner and implement a working prototype of PrivateMeetUp.