Abstract-Co-location information about users is increasingly available online. For instance, mobile users more and more frequently report their co-locations with other users in the messages and in the pictures they post on social networking websites by tagging the names of the friends they are with. The users' IP addresses also constitute a source of co-location information. Combined with (possibly obfuscated) location information, such co-locations can be used to improve the inference of the users' locations, thus further threatening their location privacy: As co-location information is taken into account, not only a user's reported locations and mobility patterns can be used to localize her, but also those of her friends (and the friends of their friends and so on). In this paper, we study this problem by quantifying the effect of co-location information on location privacy, considering an adversary such as a social network operator that has access to such information. We formalize the problem and derive an optimal inference algorithm that incorporates such co-location information, yet at the cost of high complexity. We propose some approximate inference algorithms, including a solution that relies on the belief propagation algorithm executed on a general Bayesian network model, and we extensively evaluate their performance. Our experimental results show that, even in the case where the adversary considers co-locations of the targeted user with a single friend, the median location privacy of the user is decreased by up to 62% in a typical setting. We also study the effect of the different parameters (e.g., the settings of the location-privacy protection mechanisms) in different scenarios.
Individuals share increasing amounts of personal data online. This data often involves-or at least has privacy implications for-data subjects other than the individual who shares it (e.g., photos, genomic data) and the data is shared without their consent. A popular example, with dramatic consequences, is revenge pornography. In this paper, we propose ConsenShare, a system for sharing, in a consensual (wrt the data subjects) and privacy-preserving (wrt both service providers and other individuals) way, data involving subjects other than the uploader. We describe a complete design and implementation of ConsenShare for photos, which relies on image processing and cryptographic techniques, as well as on a two-tier architecture (one entity for detecting the data subjects and contacting them; one entity for hosting the data and for collecting consent). We benchmark the performance (CPU and bandwidth) of ConsenShare by using a dataset of 20k photos from Flickr. We also conduct a survey targeted at Facebook users (N = 321). Our results are quite encouraging: The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of our approach (i.e., acceptable overheads) and the survey results demonstrate potential interest from the users.
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