Privacy in Mobile Computing for Location-Sharing-Based Services

Location-Sharing-Based Services (LSBS) complement Location-Based Services by using locations from a group of users, and not just individuals, to provide some contextualized service based on the locations in the group. However, there are growing concerns about the misuse of location data by third-parties, which fuels the need for more privacy controls in such services. We address the relevant problem of privacy in LSBSs by providing practical and effective solutions to the privacy problem in one such service, namely the fair rendez-vous point (FRVP) determination service. The privacy preserving FRVP (PPFRVP) problem is general enough and nicely captures the computations and privacy requirements in LSBSs. In this paper, we propose two privacy-preserving algorithms for the FRVP problem and analytically evaluate their privacy in both passive and active adversarial scenarios. We study the practical feasibility and performance of the proposed approaches by implementing them on Nokia mobile devices. By means of a targeted user-study, we attempt to gain further understanding of the popularity, the privacy and acceptance of the proposed solutions.