A privacy service for location-based collaboration among mobile users

Abstract

The potential loss of privacy due to the use of locationbased applications may be one of the greatest obstacles to their wider acceptance. Nevertheless, most research about privacy management to-date has not taken into consideration the complexity in the utilization of collaborative applications that may require users' location sharing among participants. In this article, we propose a privacy service that helps users to maintain their privacy policy in a flexible and incremental way. We also carried out a qualitative evaluation study whose results illustrate several challenges that should be handled in the design of such a service.