Major Domus Redux: Privacy in Mobile Social P2P Networks

Social networks have seen an unprecedented surge of interest in the past few years. Traditionally, they are restricted to central server farms which collect huge amounts of private information from their users. This fails to address two key issues which we expect to shape future social networks: (1) including mobility and location awareness and (2) privacy concerns of the users. Our paper addresses the locality challenge by providing a distributed wireless peer-to-peer infrastructure, which enables discovering of user profiles of nearby users and their friends. More importantly, using easy-to-understand mechanisms that preserve your privacy and render the storage of plain data unnecessary, our system facilitates meeting new friends and recognising old friends in a crowd. Unlike prior approaches in social networking, we focus on utilising mobile devices that establish direct connections to each other, broadcasting camouflaged information that preserve user privacy without losing the ability of similarity finding using a technology based on a graph representation of a user’s data-set and subsequently mapped on a Bloom filter. Furthermore, our approach can be generalised to utilise an inherent property of social networks, namely transitivity, that makes it even more common to get into contact with new, like-minded people.