Location Privacy and Utility in Geo-social Networks: Survey and Research Challenges

Location information sharing on popular online social networking platforms like Facebook and Foursquare brings mutual benefits for the users of these platforms (e.g., free locationbased services) as well as the platform providers (e.g., locationbased businesses). An obvious problem however that impedes these mutual benefits are privacy concerns related to location data of users, which also curb their active participation. In this paper, we analyze the role of existing location privacypreserving mechanisms in minimizing this mutual loss of benefits. Our analysis reveals that most existing mechanisms either ignore social platform related user-privacy concerns or they disregard location data-quality related demands of the platform providers. Moreover, we also point out concrete research gaps and implementation issues related to existing privacy mechanisms.