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A check-in shielding scheme against acquaintance inference in location-based social networks

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Abstract

Location-based social services such as Foursquare and Facebook Place allow users to perform check-ins at places and interact with each other in geography (e.g. check-in together). While existing studies have exhibited that the adversary can accurately infer social ties based on check-in data, the traditional check-in mechanism cannot protect the acquaintance privacy of users. In this work, therefore, we propose a novel shielding check-in system, whose goal is to guide users to check-in at secure places. We accordingly propose a novel research problem, Check-in Shielding against Acquaintance Inference (CSAI), which aims at recommending a list of secure places when users intend to check-ins so that the potential that the adversary correctly identifies the friends of users can be significantly reduced. We develop the Check-in Shielding Scheme (CSS) framework to solve the CSAI problem. CSS consists of two steps, namely estimating the social strength between users and generating a list of secure places. Experiments conducted on Foursquare and Gowalla check-in datasets show that CSS is able to not only outperform several competing methods under various scenario settings, but also lead to the check-in distance preserving and ensure the usability of the new check-in data in Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by Ministry of Science and Technology, R.O.C., under Contract 107-2221-E-006-165-MY2, 107-2218-E-006-040, 107-2321-B-006-017, 107-2636-E-006-002 (MOST Young Scholar Fellowship) and 107-2221-E-006-199. In addition, we also thank the support from Academia Sinica under the Grant AS-107-TP-A05. Also, we would like to thank anonymous reviewers and the editor for their very useful comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate Program of Multimedia Systems and Intelligent Computing, National Cheng Kung University and Academia Sinica, Tainan, Taiwan

    Bo-Heng Chen

  2. Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan

    Bo-Heng Chen & Kun-Ta Chuang

  3. Department of Statistics, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan

    Cheng-Te Li

  4. Institute of Data Science, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan

    Cheng-Te Li

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  1. Bo-Heng Chen
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  2. Cheng-Te Li
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Correspondence to Kun-Ta Chuang.

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Chen, BH., Li, CT. & Chuang, KT. A check-in shielding scheme against acquaintance inference in location-based social networks. World Wide Web 22, 2321–2354 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-018-0653-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-018-0653-3

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