Privacy-enhanced opportunistic networks

Opportunistic networks have been the study of much research --- in particular on making end-to-end routing efficient. Social network information is often exploited in opportunistic network routing, but simple social network routing schemes broadcast social network information, which introduces privacy concerns. These inherent privacy issues have not been the subject of much research. Is it possible to add privacy features to opportunistic networks without degrading the user experience? What privacy concerns do users have? How might we build an opportunistic network that can mitigate users' concerns while efficiently delivering data? Our early work suggests that it is possible to modify social network routing to add privacy-enhancing features. We are currently planning experiments to determine the privacy concerns of users in different contexts when using opportunistic networks. We will then use our understanding of these concerns to inform design of a privacy-aware social network routing protocol which dynamically adapts to users' privacy requirements in different contexts.