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]