Abstract The proliferation of smart devices in the Internet of Things has given rise to the Smart City. Despite improvements in the service quality, the Smart City suffers from potential privacy threats. Adversaries can take advantage of Smart Cities and launch various attacks to learn sensitive information about individuals, especially through social links and locations. Motivated by this, we comprehensively survey current attacks and existing protection schemes. In addition, we place special focus on social link privacy and location privacy, which are two primary privacy issues under the scenario of the Smart City. Built upon the survey, we further propose some possible promising future research directions to pave the way for potential privacy protection methods.