Friendship-based location privacy in Mobile Social Networks
Wei Che Chang, Jie Wu, Chiu C. Tan · International Journal of Security and Networks · 2011
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.