The quest for location-privacy in opportunistic mobile social networks

Location-tracking is a major privacy problem, especially with high penetration of smart-phones and GPS-enabled devices around the world. In this paper, we propose a Hybrid and Social-aware Location-Privacy in Opportunistic mobile social networks (HSLPO), a collaborative and distributed obfuscation protocol that offers location-privacy k-anonymity. HSLPO discovers the users´ own social network and use it to obfuscate requests and hide the original sender´s location from the Location based service (LBS) while minimizing the overhead needed to perform obfuscation. We performed extensive simulations over a map-based pseudo realistic environment to compare HSLPO to exiting protocols. Results show that HSLPO can reach higher location-privacy levels and quality of service, in term of success ratio, than other protocols while maintaining low overheads.