The shy mayor: Private badges in geosocial networks Conference

Carbunar, B, Sion, R, Potharaju, R et al. (2012). The shy mayor: Private badges in geosocial networks . EURO-PAR 2011 PARALLEL PROCESSING, PT 1, 7341 LNCS 436-454. 10.1007/978-3-642-31284-7_26

cited authors

  • Carbunar, B; Sion, R; Potharaju, R; Ehsan, M

authors

abstract

  • Location based social or geosocial networks (GSNs) have recently emerged as a natural combination of location based services with online social networks: users register their location and activities, share it with friends and achieve special status (e.g., "mayorship" badges) based on aggregate location predicates. Boasting millions of users and tens of millions of daily check-ins, such services pose significant privacy threats: user location information may be tracked and leaked to third parties. Conversely, a solution enabling location privacy may provide cheating capabilities to users wanting to claim special location status. In this paper we introduce new mechanisms that allow users to (inter)act privately in today's geosocial networks while simultaneously ensuring honest behavior. An Android implementation is provided. The Google Nexus One smartphone is shown to be able to perform tens of badge proofs per minute. Providers can support hundreds of million of check-ins and status verifications per day. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.

publication date

  • July 9, 2012

published in

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 13

start page

  • 436

end page

  • 454

volume

  • 7341 LNCS