Towards a New Privacy-Aware Location Sharing Platform
Marcello Paolo Scipioni and Marc Langheinrich
University of Lugano (USI)
Faculty of Informatics
6904 Lugano, Switzerland
{fmarcello.paolo.scipioni, marc.langheinrichg}@usi.ch
Abstract
Location-based social networking services are becoming
increasingly popular among the multitude
of mobile applications. The new location sharing
functionalities made possible by GPS-based mobile
phones, however, also raise two main privacy issues:
users are typically limited to a only few built-in
options that do not support fine-granular or even
changing privacy preferences, and location data are
often implicitly shared with service providers in the
process. This paper argues for a new groupbased
architecture for privacy-aware location sharing,
developed starting from a use-case analysis of
sharing patterns and a brief review of existing privacy
options in today¡¯s popular location-sharing
applications. This is complemented by a stakeholder
discussion with a view towards identifying the
various location privacy threats. Based on this analysis,
we present a decentralized architecture for
location sharing, based on the popular XMPP instant
messaging platform, which supports sharing
location information at different granularities directly
with different sets of contcts. This gives more
flexibility to users in terms of sharing patterns, thus
providing more privacy as users can decide in
detail what kind of location data to share with whom. The
system also avoid the central disclosure
of all user location data to the service provider, by
either employing private servers or relying on
end-to-end encryption between contacts.
Keywords: Location Sharing, Location Privacy,
Location Based Services, Mobile Location Privacy
Journal
of Internet Services and Information Security (JISIS), 1(4): 47-59, November 2011 [pdf]