Private Sharing of User Location over Online Social Networks

Online social networks increasingly allow mobile users to share their location with their friends. Much to the detriment of users’ privacy, this also means that social network operators collect users’ lo- cation. Similarly, third parties can learn users’ location from localization and location visualization services. Ideally, third-parties should not be given complete access to users’ location. To protect location privacy, we design and implement a platform-independent solution for users to share their location in a private fashion over online social networks. Our so- lution relies on encryption to enforce access control and uses dummy queries and caching to protect localization and location visualization.