Who's your best friend? Targeted privacy attacks in location-sharing social networks

Vassilis Kostakos, Jayant Venkatanathan, Bernardo Reynolds, Norman Sadeh, Eran Toch, Siraj A. Shaikh, Simon Jones

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

This paper presents a study that aims to answer two important questions related to targeted location-sharing privacy attacks: (1) given a group of users and their social graph, is it possible to predict which among them is likely to reveal most about their whereabouts, and (2) given a user, is it possible to predict which among her friends knows most about her whereabouts. To answer these questions we analyse the privacy policies of users of a real-time location sharing application, in which users actively shared their location with their contacts. The results show that users who are central to their network are more likely to reveal most about their whereabouts. Furthermore, we show that the friend most likely to know the whereabouts of a specific individual is the one with most common contacts and/or greatest number of contacts.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationUbiComp'11 - Proceedings of the 2011 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing
Pages177-186
Number of pages10
DOIs
StatePublished - 2011
Externally publishedYes
Event13th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, UbiComp'11 and the Co-located Workshops - Beijing, China
Duration: 17 Sep 201121 Sep 2011

Publication series

NameUbiComp'11 - Proceedings of the 2011 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing

Conference

Conference13th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, UbiComp'11 and the Co-located Workshops
Country/TerritoryChina
CityBeijing
Period17/09/1121/09/11

Keywords

  • location sharing
  • privacy
  • privacy attacks

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Computer Science Applications

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