MobiShare: Flexible Privacy-Preserving Location Sharing in Mobile Online Social Networks

Location sharing is a fundamental component of mobile online social networks (mOSNs), which also raises significant privacy concerns. The mOSNs collect a large amount of location information over time, and the users' location privacy is compromised if their location information is abused by adversaries controlling the mOSNs. In this paper, we present MobiShare, a system that provides flexible privacy-preserving location sharing in mOSNs. MobiShare is flexible to support a variety of location-based applications, in that it enables location sharing between both trusted social relations and untrusted strangers, and it supports range query and user-defined access control. In MobiShare, neither the social network server nor the location server has a complete knowledge of the users' identities and locations. The users' location privacy is protected even if either of the entities colludes with malicious users.