TISS-loc: Towards User Control of Privacy in Location Disclosure

The rise in popularity of location disclosure brings privacy concerns to the forefront. Mechanisms are needed that empower users to personalize the balance between the benefits of location awareness and privacy. This paper presents TISS-loc, which leverages trust management foundations to enhance control of location disclosure. TISS-loc supports location obfuscation to balance privacy and the benefits of disclosure, it uses stereotyping to promote openness and scalability on the number of requestors, it supports automatic update of disclosure policies based on requestor behavior, and it supports multilateral and multi-level decision making. The paper also describes an Android-based implementation of TISS-loc and a user study that investigates whether end users can understand and use TISS-loc.