Protecting the Location Privacy of Mobile Social Media Users

Abstract

Unprecedented volumes of location-based information have been produced as a result of the widespread adoption of social network applications and GPS-enabled devices and sensors. Publication of such location data can provide valuable resources for researchers and government agencies in applications ranging from near real-time population-wide health monitoring to planning for future cities. However, such data hold personally identifying information, which gives rise to many privacy issues. There is thus a pressing need for ways to restrict this inherently identifying location-related information, however ideally we would like to preserve the utility of the data. Importantly, any such solution ..