Game-Theoretic Model of Incentivizing Privacy-Aware Users to Consent to Location Tracking

摘要

Nowadays, mobile users have a vast number of applications and services attheir disposal. Each of these might impose some privacy threats on users'"Personally Identifiable Information" (PII). Location privacy is a crucial partof PII, and as such, privacy-aware users wish to maximize it. This privacy canbe, for instance, threatened by a company, which collects users' traces andshares them with third parties. To maximize their location privacy, users candecide to get offline so that the company cannot localize their devices. Thelonger a user stays connected to a network, the more services he might receive,but his location privacy decreases. In this paper, we analyze the trade-offbetween location privacy, the level of services that a user experiences, andthe profit of the company. To this end, we formulate a Stackelberg Bayesiangame between the User (follower) and the Company (leader). We presenttheoretical results characterizing the equilibria of the game. To the best ofour knowledge, our work is the first to model the economically rationaldecision-making of the service provider (i.e., the Company) in conjunction withthe rational decision-making of users who wish to protect their locationprivacy. To evaluate the performance of our approach, we have used real-datafrom a testbed, and we have also shown that the game-theoretic strategy of theCompany outperforms non-strategic methods. Finally, we have considereddifferent User privacy types, and have determined the service level thatincentivizes the User to stay connected as long as possible.