Prophet: A Context-Aware Location Privacy-Preserving Scheme in Location Sharing Service

Location sharing service has become an indispensable part in mobile social networks. However, location sharing may introduce a new class of privacy threats ranging from localizing an individual to profiling and identifying him based on the places he shared. Although users may avoid releasing geocont...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jiaxing Qu, Guoyin Zhang, Zhou Fang
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Wiley 2017-01-01
Series:Discrete Dynamics in Nature and Society
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2017/6814832
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Location sharing service has become an indispensable part in mobile social networks. However, location sharing may introduce a new class of privacy threats ranging from localizing an individual to profiling and identifying him based on the places he shared. Although users may avoid releasing geocontent in sensitive locations, it does not necessarily prevent the adversary from inferring users’ privacy through space-temporal correlations and historical information. In this paper, we design a Prophet framework, which provides an effective security scheme for users sharing their location information. First, we define fingerprint identification based on Markov chain and state classification to describe the users’ behavior patterns. Then, we propose a novel location anonymization mechanism, which adopts a ε-indistinguishability strategy to protect user’s sensitive location information published. Finally, experimental results are given to illustrate good performance and effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
ISSN:1026-0226
1607-887X