Publish me and protect me: Personalized and flexible location privacy protection in mobile social networks

With the increasing proliferation of the Mobile Social Networks (MSN) and the Location Based Service (LBS), location privacy has attracted broad attention in recent years. Most researches have been done with the assumption that the server is untrusted and a trusted third party is introduced to protect the user location privacy when a user sends queries for the location service. In this paper, we reconsider this assumption and propose a Personalized and Flexible location privacy protection Model (PFM) based on user relationship strength. We conduct researches in the situation that the server is trusted while malicious users in the MSN can disguise as a friend to break location privacy. We present an entropic TF-IDF based approach to measure the bi-directional relationship strength and propose probability distribution based cloaking model to protect user location privacy. We thoroughly evaluate our methods based on Quality of Privacy (QoP) via real and synthetic data.