Eat the Cake and Have It Too: Privacy Preserving Location Aggregates in Geosocial Networks

Abstract: Geosocial networks are online social networks centered on the locations of subscribers and businesses. Providing input to targeted advertising, profiling social network users becomes an important source of revenue. Its natural reliance on personal information introduces a trade-off between user privacy and incentives of participation for businesses and geosocial network providers. In this paper we introduce location centric profiles (LCPs), aggregates built over the profiles of users present at a given location. We introduce PROFILR, a suite of mechanisms that construct LCPs in a private and correct manner. We introduce iSafe, a novel, context aware public safety application built on PROFILR . Our Android and browser plugin implementations show that PROFILR is efficient: the end-to-end overhead is small even under strong correctness assurances.