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A Novel Location Privacy Protection Algorithm for Social Discovery Application

ABSTRACT With the development of smartphones and mobile wireless network, social discovery applications are becoming more and more popular now. These applications help users to chat with nearby people and make friends. However, the location of a user could be exploited by attackers in some situations. This paper concentrates on the protection of location privacy in social discovery application. Firstly, we formalize the location attack problem using probability theory. Then we propose a new distance obfuscation method to defend the location inference attack. Guided by entropy theory, we obfuscate the distance between two users with a specific probability instead of random obfuscation to make the inference attack more difficult. To keep the balance between the privacy level and the service quality, we resolve the optimal mechanism. Experimental results show that the proposed method performs well in protecting the users’ locations without significantly compromising the quality-of-service of social discovery applications.