RPAR: Location Privacy Preserving via Repartitioning Anonymous Region in Mobile Social Network

Abstract

Applying the proliferated location-based services (LBSs) to social networks has spawned mobile social network (MSN) services that allow users to discover potential friends around them. While enjoying the convenience of MSN services, the mobile users also are confronted with the risk of location disclosure, which is a severe privacy preserving concern. In this paper, we focus on the problem of location privacy preserving in MSN. Particularly, we propose a repartitioning anonymous region for location privacy preserving (RPAR) scheme based on the central anonymous location which minimizes the traffic between the anonymous server and the LBS server while protecting the privacy of the user location. Furthermore, our scheme enables the users to get more accurate query results, thus improving the quality of the location service. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme can effectively reduce the area of anonymous regions and minimize the traffic.