Volume 1 - Issue 4
Towards a New Privacy-Aware Location Sharing Platform
- Marcello Paolo Scipioni
University of Lugano (USI), Faculty of Informatics, 6904 Lugano, Switzerland
marcello.paolo.scipioni@usi.ch
- Marc Langheinrich
University of Lugano (USI), Faculty of Informatics, 6904 Lugano, Switzerland
marc.langheinrich@usi.ch
Keywords: Location Sharing, Location Privacy, Location Based Services, Mobile Location Privacy
Abstract
Location-based social networking services are becoming increasingly popular among the multitude
of mobile applications. The new location sharing functionalities made possible by GPS-based mobile
phones, however, also raise two main privacy issues: users are typically limited to a only few built-in
options that do not support fine-granular or even changing privacy preferences, and location data are
often implicitly shared with service providers in the process. This paper argues for a new group-
based architecture for privacy-aware location sharing, developed starting from a use-case analysis of
sharing patterns and a brief review of existing privacy options in today’s popular location-sharing
applications. This is complemented by a stakeholder discussion with a view towards identifying the
various location privacy threats. Based on this analysis, we present a decentralized architecture for
location sharing, based on the popular XMPP instant messaging platform, which supports sharing
location information at different granularities directly with different sets of contcts. This gives more
flexibility to users in terms of sharing patterns, thus providing more privacy as users can decide in
detail what kind of location data to share with whom. The system also avoid the central disclosure
of all user location data to the service provider, by either employing private servers or relying on
end-to-end encryption between contacts.