New Privacy-Preserving Location Sharing System for Mobile Online Social Networks

Mobile online social networks (mOSNs) become more and more popular, and compared with traditional OSNs, mOSNs take a step further in that they provide the location-based services, which also raise significant privacy concerns. Location sharing is a fundamental component of mOSN, however, users may be hesitant to share locations if privacy is not guaranteed. In this paper, we present a new privacy-preserving location sharing system for mOSN, which is flexible to support a variety of location-based applications, in that it enables location sharing between both trusted social relations and untrusted strangers. In this system, threat models are further analyzed and users´ location privacy is proved to be preserved.