A new approach for sharing location info

Where Are They Now – safe location sharing.

A new model for location sharing services

Dmitry Namiot Lomonosov Moscow State University

Manfred Sneps-Sneppe Ventspils University College

ruSMART 2012

Dmitry Namiot http://servletsuite.blogspot.com

• “Where are you” is one of the most often asked question during the communications. 600 billion text messages per year in the US • Sharing location info is one of the popular functions for LBS applications• Mostly – via sharing location info through social networks. Could be either direct settings or “check-ins”• One of the biggest concerns for all location-based services is user’s privacy. The biggest problem for LBS adoption.

What are we talking about?


Existing solutions

• Access restriction: only part of the social graph can see location• Location obfuscation. It could be social graph dependent too. • K-anonymity• The central store knows all. It is trusted source in the existing models.• Can we share location info without the central server?


Geo Messages

• Lets you add signature with location info to messages (email, SMS)• It is peer to peer sharing• Difficulty to operate if you have many peers


WATNWhere Are They Now

• Key moment for privacy related problems: central store with IDs and location info

• WATN – share location information without the entity that knows all

• Developed and implemented as mobile web application (HTML5)

• HTML5 is significant here


WATN

• Distributed database: identification and location should be separated• Social graph and anonymous location info should be saved server-side• Identification info should be saved locally• Each participant should have own copy of identification database• There is no global ID for the participant


WATN

• Run: a) get unique ID or read it from local storage b) perform check-in (save location info)

• Share:a) send a link with own ID. It is an ordinary

message (outside of this application)b) two IDs for ‘share location’ link


WATN


WATN• Server keeps two things.

a) location info with meaningless IDs. Just a set of current coordinates for users (presented via own IDs)

ID1 -> (latitude, longitude)ID2 -> (latitude, longitude)ID3 -> (latitude, longitude) etc.

b) social graph – who is sharing location to whom:

ID1-> (ID2, ID3)ID3 -> (ID1) etc.


WATN


WATN• Client side: keeps legend

ID1 -> (name or nick)ID2 -> (name or nick)

• Data flow:

a) request social graph by IDb) obtain data from server (JSON)c) map data against locally saved legend and replace IDs with nick names


WATN


Conclusion

• A new approach for sharing location information• There is no central server with IDs for all participants• Separated location info and identity• Shortly: peer to peer location sharing system with distributed database for location info and identity

Technology

A new approach for sharing location info