Location Based Social Networking in Geo-Social Applications

With geo-social applications, like FourSquare, Gowalla millions of people communicate with their surroundings through their friends and their recommendations and comments. Without privacy protection, these applications can be easily misused, e. g. , to track or target users for home invasion. In this paper, we introduce a novel alternative Locx that provides signicantly-improved location privacy without providing uncertainty into query results or relying on strong assumptions on server security. Our key in sight is to apply secure user-specic, coordinate transformations to all location data shared in the server. The friends of a user share this users secrets so they can apply the same transformation We show that LocX provides location privacy even against a powerful adversary, and making it suitable for todays mobile device applications. Also Locx provides location privacy with very little performance overhead, and location transformation function is used to hide the location data from others.