User-defined privacy location-sharing system in mobile online social networks

With the fusion of social networks and location-based services, location sharing is one of the most important services in mobile online social networks (mOSNs). In location-sharing services, users have to provide their location information to service provider. However, location information is sensitive to users, which may cause a privacy-preserving issue needs to be solved. In the existing research, location-sharing services, such as friends’ query, does not consider the attacks from friends. In fact, a user may not trust all of his/her friends, so just a part of his/her friends will be allowed to obtain the user's location information. In addition, users’ location privacy and social network privacy should be guaranteed. In order to solve the above problems, we propose a new architecture and a new scheme called User-Defined Privacy Location-Sharing (UDPLS) system for mOSNs. In our scheme, the query time is almost irrelevant to the number of friends. We also evaluate the performance and validate the correctness of our proposed algorithm through extensive simulations.