A privacy preserving system for friend locator applications

  • Authors:

  • Bin Zan;Tingting Sun;Marco Gruteser;Fei Hu;Yanyong Zhang

  • Affiliations:

  • Rutgers University, North Brunswick, NJ, USA;Rutgers University, North Brunswick, NJ, USA;Rutgers University, North Brunswick, NJ, USA;The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA;Rutgers University, North Brunswick, NJ, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 9th ACM international symposium on Mobility management and wireless access
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

One interesting application of online social networks is the friend locator, in which the application server informs users through mobile devices if their listed friends are nearby in terms of geographical locations. However, in such services, it is challenging to protect the privacy of an individual user. Previous privacy protection solutions for friend locators do not guarantee a high level of privacy and maintain efficiency. In this paper, we propose a privacy preserving system to guarantee both strong privacy and efficiency. Additionally, we use the polygon decomposition method to achieve both accuracy and flexibility especially for irregular areas of interest. Finally, through numerical analysis and simulation, we show that the proposed system and algorithm can achieve high privacy, efficiency, accuracy and flexibility.