I'm Here! Privacy Challenges in Mobile Location Sharing

With the availability of GPS receivers in more and more mobile handsets, location sharing has become the next mobile killer-app. Services like Google Latitude or Yahoo’s FireEagle are used by thousands of subscribers to share their current location in real-time with their family, their friends, or even publish it online, while Sense Network’s CitySense application uses live movement traces from entire metropolitan areas to show users the \most popular places" in the city. Even though research in location privacy has proposed a range of solutions for safeguarding location information, it is unclear how existing proposals can be applied to such applications. In this paper, we set forth a categorization of location sharing applications, outline the various privacy challenges each category poses, and discuss the shortcomings of existing solutions.

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