Zerosquare: A Privacy-Friendly Location Hub for Geosocial Applications
نویسنده
چکیده
The localization abilities of smartphones have provided a huge boost to the popularity of geosocial applications, which facilitate social interaction between users geographically close to each other. However, today’s geosocial applications raise privacy concerns due to application providers storing large amounts of information about users (e.g., profile information) and locations (e.g., users present at a location). We propose Zerosquare, a privacy-friendly location hub that encourages the development of privacy-preserving geosocial applications. Our primary goal is to store information such that no entity can link a user’s identity to her location. Other goals include decoupling storing data from manipulating data for social networking purposes, designing an architecture flexible enough to support a wide range of use cases, and limiting client-side computation. Zerosquare consists of two separate server components for storing information about users and about locations, respectively, and optional cloud components for supporting applications. We describe the design of the API exposed by the server components and demonstrate how it can be used to build several sample geosocial applications. We provide a proof-of-concept implementation using Python for the server components and the Android platform for the mobile devices and build several realworld geosocial applications on top of Zerosquare. Finally, we present experimental results that demonstrate the practicality of Zerosquare.
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