1,207 research outputs found
Preserving Co-Location Privacy in Geo-Social Networks
The number of people on social networks has grown exponentially. Users share
very large volumes of personal informations and content every days. This
content could be tagged with geo-spatial and temporal coordinates that may be
considered sensitive for some users. While there is clearly a demand for users
to share this information with each other, there is also substantial demand for
greater control over the conditions under which their information is shared.
Content published in a geo-aware social networks (GeoSN) often involves
multiple users and it is often accessible to multiple users, without the
publisher being aware of the privacy preferences of those users. This makes
difficult for GeoSN users to control which information about them is available
and to whom it is available. Thus, the lack of means to protect users privacy
scares people bothered about privacy issues. This paper addresses a particular
privacy threats that occur in GeoSNs: the Co-location privacy threat. It
concerns the availability of information about the presence of multiple users
in a same locations at given times, against their will. The challenge addressed
is that of supporting privacy while still enabling useful services.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure
Location Privacy in Spatial Crowdsourcing
Spatial crowdsourcing (SC) is a new platform that engages individuals in
collecting and analyzing environmental, social and other spatiotemporal
information. With SC, requesters outsource their spatiotemporal tasks to a set
of workers, who will perform the tasks by physically traveling to the tasks'
locations. This chapter identifies privacy threats toward both workers and
requesters during the two main phases of spatial crowdsourcing, tasking and
reporting. Tasking is the process of identifying which tasks should be assigned
to which workers. This process is handled by a spatial crowdsourcing server
(SC-server). The latter phase is reporting, in which workers travel to the
tasks' locations, complete the tasks and upload their reports to the SC-server.
The challenge is to enable effective and efficient tasking as well as reporting
in SC without disclosing the actual locations of workers (at least until they
agree to perform a task) and the tasks themselves (at least to workers who are
not assigned to those tasks). This chapter aims to provide an overview of the
state-of-the-art in protecting users' location privacy in spatial
crowdsourcing. We provide a comparative study of a diverse set of solutions in
terms of task publishing modes (push vs. pull), problem focuses (tasking and
reporting), threats (server, requester and worker), and underlying technical
approaches (from pseudonymity, cloaking, and perturbation to exchange-based and
encryption-based techniques). The strengths and drawbacks of the techniques are
highlighted, leading to a discussion of open problems and future work
Search Me If You Can: Privacy-preserving Location Query Service
Location-Based Service (LBS) becomes increasingly popular with the dramatic
growth of smartphones and social network services (SNS), and its context-rich
functionalities attract considerable users. Many LBS providers use users'
location information to offer them convenience and useful functions. However,
the LBS could greatly breach personal privacy because location itself contains
much information. Hence, preserving location privacy while achieving utility
from it is still an challenging question now. This paper tackles this
non-trivial challenge by designing a suite of novel fine-grained
Privacy-preserving Location Query Protocol (PLQP). Our protocol allows
different levels of location query on encrypted location information for
different users, and it is efficient enough to be applied in mobile platforms.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figure, 2 tables, IEEE INFOCOM 201
De-anonymizable location cloaking for privacy-controlled mobile systems
The rapid technology upgrades of mobile devices and the popularity of wireless networks significantly drive the emergence and development of Location-based Services (LBSs), thus greatly expanding the business of online services and enriching the user experience. However, the personal location data shared with the service providers also leave hidden risks on location privacy. Location anonymization techniques transform the exact location of a user into a cloaking area by including the locations of multiple users in the exposed area such that the exposed location is indistinguishable from that of the other users. However in such schemes, location information once perturbed cannot be recovered from the cloaking region and as a result, users of the location cannot obtain fine granular information even when they have access to it. In this paper, we propose Dynamic Reversible Cloaking (DRC) a new de-anonymziable location cloaking mechanism that allows to restore the actual location from the perturbed information through the use of an anonymization key. Extensive experiments using realistic road network traces show that the proposed scheme is efficient, effective and scalable
- …