Conference Proceedings

Who's your best friend? Targeted privacy attacks in location-sharing social networks

V Kostakos, J Venkatanathan, B Reynolds, N Sadeh, E Toch, SA Shaikh, S Jones

Ubicomp 11 Proceedings of the 2011 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing | ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY | Published : 2011

Abstract

This paper presents a study that aims to answer two important questions related to targeted location-sharing privacy attacks: (1) given a group of users and their social graph, is it possible to predict which among them is likely to reveal most about their whereabouts, and (2) given a user, is it possible to predict which among her friends knows most about her whereabouts. To answer these questions we analyse the privacy policies of users of a real-time location sharing application, in which users actively shared their location with their contacts. The results show that users who are central to their network are more likely to reveal most about their whereabouts. Furthermore, we show that th..

View full abstract

University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Awarded by NSF


Awarded by CyLab at Carnegie Mellon from the Army Research Office


Awarded by Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT)


Awarded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia


Funding Acknowledgements

This work is funded by NSF grants CNS-0627513, CNS-0905562, CNS-1012763, by CyLab at Carnegie Mellon under grants DAAD19-02-1-0389 and W911NF-09-1-0273 from the Army Research Office. Additional support has been provided by Google and the CMU/Portugal Information and Communication Technologies Institute and the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) grant CMU-PT/SE/0028/2008 (Web Security and Privacy). The authors would also like to acknowledge the entire Locaccino team, including Jason Hong, Lorrie Cranor, Paul Hankes Drielsma, Justin Cranshaw, Patrick Gage Kelley, Jialiu Lin and Michael Benisch for their contributions.