SpotME: promoting location privacy, one lie at a time

Last week at ICDS and today at Eurecom, I presented our work on location privacy. Here is the basic idea -

By sharing their location on mobile social-networking services, mobile phone users benefit from a variety of  new services working on *aggregate* location data such as receiving  road traffic estimations and finding the best nightlife "hotspots" in a city. However, location sharing has caused outcries over privacy issues - you cannot really trust private companies with your private location data ;)  That's why we have recently proposed a  a piece of software for privacy-conscious individuals and called it SpotME (here is the paper). This software  can run directly on a mobile phone and reports, in addition to  actual locations, a very large number of erroneous  (fake) locations.  Fake locations:  are carefully chosen by a so-called randomised algorithm,  guarantee that individuals cannot be localized with high probability, yet they have little effect on services offered to car drivers in  Zurich and to subway passengers in London. For technical details, please have a go at the paper ;)