PDVLoc: A Personal Data Vault for Controlled Location Data Sharing

Location-Based Mobile Service (LBMS) is one of the most popular smartphone services. LBMS enables people to more easily connect with each other and analyze the aspects of their lives. However, sharing location data can leak people's privacy. We present PDVLoc, a controlled location data-sharing framework based on selectively sharing data through a Personal Data Vault (PDV). A PDV is a privacy architecture in which individuals retain ownership of their data. Data are routinely filtered before being shared with content-service providers, and users or data custodian services can participate in making controlled data-sharing decisions. Introducing PDVLoc gives users flexible and granular access control over their location data. We have implemented a prototype of PDVLoc and evaluated it using real location-sharing social networking applications, Google Latitude and Foursquare. Our user study of 19 participants over 20 days shows that most users find that PDVLoc is useful to manage and control their location data, and are willing to continue using PDVLoc.