A Privacy-by-Design Approach to Location Sharing

Despite the proliferation of location-based services on mobile platforms, privacy concerns still refrain many people from using them regularly. Moreover, current location sharing tools often present over-simplistic privacy settings by which users are forced to the binary alternative of sharing everything or nothing. The goal of this research is to build novel privacy-aware tools through which users can share their location more easily and in the way they consider more appropriate. Starting from the study of the sharing functionalities and how people use them, I aim at building a platform for efficiently sharing location, supported by a usable interface through which users can easily understand how sharing works and feel in control of their data. Furthermore, the security mechanisms employed are conceived such that privacy is considered as an integral part of the sharing mechanisms, in a privacy-by-design approach.