Location Privacy Management and Protection in Geo-social Networks

In recent years there has been a growing increase in the number of users that use social networks as a form of expression and sharing. These networks of social relationships are by now widespread thanks both to the growing availability of fast Internet connections and the spread of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. In particular, the capability of these latest generation mobile devices to detect the position of the users has led to the emergence of geo-aware social networks (GeoSN) together with new location based services. Hundreds of location-based applications are now available and, besides, most of the major social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Foursquare, offer to their users the possibility of geo tagging the published contents. For example a common use case is to post a new status together with the user´s geographic coordinates, or publish a photo with the position of where it has been taken.