Supporting location information privacy in mobile devices

Abstract

Social networking has evolved as a basic amenity in today's interconnected world. Users of social media tools do not always keep up with privacy policies and its adverse effects. It is very common that even experienced users are often caught unaware of actions that happen behind the interface screens of their interconnection devices. Many-a-time mobile application developers take advantage of such user complacency and leak location information from the device (and hence information about the user) to other applications. Though there has been considerable alerts raised on the issue of location information leakage, there are situations wherein applications sneak through these 'walls' and connect with devices /applications to extract /query desired information from the firmware. In this work, we provide a in-depth review of literature on this emerging area of social interest, and propose a four-layer context-based authentication framework (4-CBAF) to address location privacy concerns. The 4-CBAF framework provides a facility for users to share pertinent information only if the user specifically authorizes such information sharing. The 4-CBAF is intelligent enough to reduce the number of human interventions that a user should attend to. The effectiveness of the proposed 4-CBAF is also demonstrated for check-in application for Facebook using smart devices. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.