Privacy Issues in Geosocial Networks

摘要

A GeoSocial Network (GSN) is a social network enhanced with the capability to associate user data and content with location. This content-location link is getting stronger due to the swift development of GSNs and mobile technologies. Indeed, the gathered location information generates a huge amount of publicly-available location data, information that was always considered private or at least known only by friends or family. Hence, a serious privacy threat is revealed: being tracked in real time, or having location history disclosed to everyone, is a privacy invasion that needs addressing before too much control is lost. In this paper we are interested in several questions such as: How much are we at risk? Are we vigilant enough to face this risk? Are existing privacy-protection techniques sufficient to let us relax? And if so, which technique is more efficient? Are we legally protected? This paper explores these and other related questions.