Abstract
Check-in services, one of the most popular services in Geo-Social Networks (GeoSNs) may cause users’ personal location privacy leakage. Although users may avoid checking in places which they regard as sensitive, adversaries can still infer where a user has been through linkage of multiple background information. In this paper, we propose a new location privacy attack in GeoSNs, called hidden location inference attack, in which adversaries infer users’ location based on users’ check-in history as well as check-in history of her friends and similar users. Then we develop three inference models (baseline inference model, CF-based inference model and HMM-based inference model) to capture the hidden location privacy leakage probability. Moreover, we design a privacy alert framework to warn users the most probable leaked locations. At last, we conduct a comprehensive performance evaluation using two real-world datasets collected from Gowalla and Brightkite. Experiment results show the accuracy of our proposed inference models and the effectiveness of the privacy alert framework.
Keywords
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Backstrom, L., Sun, E., Marlow, C.: Find me if you can: improving geographical prediction with social and spatial proximity. In: WWW 2010, pp. 61–70 (2010)
Cho, E., Myers, S.A., Leskovec, J.: Friendship and mobility: user movement in location-based social networks. In: KDD 2011, pp. 1082–1090 (2011)
Freni, D., Vicente, C.R., Mascetti, S., Bettini, C., Jensen, C.S.: Preserving location and absence privacy in geo-social networks. In: CIKM 2010, pp. 309–318 (2010)
Gruzd, A., Wellman, B., Takhteyev, Y.: Imagining twitter as an imagined community (2011)
MIT. Hidden markov model (hmm) toolbox for matlab, http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~murphyk/Software/HMM/hmm.html
Noulas, A., Scellato, S., Mascolo, C., Pontil, M.: An empirical study of geographic user activity patterns in foursquare. In: ICWSM 2011 (2011)
Sadilek, A., Kautz, H.A., Bigham, J.P.: Finding your friends and following them to where you are. In: WSDM 2012, pp. 723–732 (2012)
Scellato, S., Noulas, A., Lambiotte, R., Mascolo, C.: Socio-spatial properties of online location-based social networks. In: ICWSM 2011 (2011)
Xue, A.Y., Zhang, R., Zheng, Y., Xie, X., Huang, J., Xu, Z.: Destination prediction by sub-trajectory synthesis and privacy protection against such prediction. In: ICDE 2013 (2013)
Ye, M., Yin, P., Lee, W.-C., Lee, D.L.: Exploiting geographical influence for collaborative point-of-interest recommendation. In: SIGIR 2011, pp. 325–334 (2011)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Huo, Z., Meng, X., Zhang, R. (2013). Feel Free to Check-in: Privacy Alert against Hidden Location Inference Attacks in GeoSNs. In: Meng, W., Feng, L., Bressan, S., Winiwarter, W., Song, W. (eds) Database Systems for Advanced Applications. DASFAA 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7825. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37487-6_29
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37487-6_29
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-37486-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-37487-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)