Towards Privacy-Preserving Location Sharing Over Mobile Online Social Networks

Location sharing services have recently gained momentum over mobile online social networks (mOSNs), seeing the increasing popularity of GPS-capable mobile devices such as smart phones. Despite the convenience brought by location sharing, there comes severe privacy risks. Though many efforts have been made to protect user privacy during location sharing, many of them rely on the extensive deployment of trusted Cellular Towers (CTs) and some incur excessive time overhead. More importantly, little research so far can support complete privacy including location privacy, identity privacy and social relation privacy. We propose SAM, a new System Architecture for mOSNs, and (PS)-S-3, a Privacy-Preserving Protocol based on SAM, to address the above issues for privacy-preserving location sharing over mOSNs. SAM and (PS)-S-3 differ from previous work in providing complete privacy for location sharing services over mOSNs. Theoretical analysis and extensive experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed system and protocol.