Privacy breach of social relation from location based mobile applications

Abstract

In today's era everyone has a smart phone and with increase use of smart phone applications available in market, raise the risk of leaking crucial information about the user and increasing the risk of privacy breach. In this paper, we are analyzing the social relationship leakage of user through such applications which uses phones Global Positioning System (GPS) data. We specifically worked on latitude-longitude (lat-long) pairs and the friend's network in popular social networking site (Facebook) to identify the social relationship between users. An existing application Mobishare has been used to conduct an experimental study on 55 users. On the basis of their location information obtain by the Mobishare application and social network's friend-list obtain from the Facebook, we calculated the percentage of togetherness between the users for different span of time, a high percentage of togetherness means they are closely related. Through this, we were able to identify the social relation between two users without his/her consent just using the GPS data that leads the privacy leakage.