Abstract
A GeoSocial Network (GSN) is an online social network enhanced with built-in location services; it can associate user data and content with location coordinates. This content-location link is getting stronger, due to the swift development of fully location-based social networks, and to the fast expansion of the mobile technologies market. As the location information thus gathered generates a huge amount of publicly-available location data, one can perform location-based social discovery with millions of users around the planet. This may sound disturbing to some, since location information has always been considered private, or at least known only to friends or family.
Hence, this raises a serious privacy threat. Is being tracked in real time, in most cases by strangers, or having location history disclosed to almost everyone, considered as a privacy invasion that needs to be addressed before all control is lost?
In this paper, we look at issues related to GSN applications and explore several questions, such as “How much are we at risk?” and “Are existing location privacy-protection techniques adopted by GSNs sufficient to protect us efficiently?”
Keywords
- Geosocial networks
- Privacy
- Impact assessment
- Mobile location
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Sahnoune, Z., Yep, C.Y., Aïmeur, E. (2015). Geolocation Hazards in Geosocial Networks. In: Benyoucef, M., Weiss, M., Mili, H. (eds) E-Technologies. MCETECH 2015. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 209. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17957-5_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17957-5_5
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