Privacy challenges in proximity based social networking: Techniques & solutions

The development of the Proximity based Mobile Social Networking (PMSN) has been growing exponentially with the adoption of smartphones and introduction of Wi-Fi hotspots in public and remote areas. Users present in the vicinity can interact with each other using the embedded technologies in their mobile devices such as GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Due to its growing momentum, this new social networking has also aroused the interest of business people and advertisers. However, due to a lack of security in these networks, several privacy concerns were reported. Users are more reluctant to share their locations and to address this issue, some initial solutions to preserve location privacy were implemented. The aim of this paper is to present a clear categorization of the different privacy threats in PMSN. Moreover, the location privacy enforcement policies and techniques used to ensure privacy are outlined and some solutions employed in existent systems are presented and discussed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study done outlining several categories of PMSN privacy challenges and their solutions in this new type of social networking services. Finally, some privacy research challenges and future perspectives are proposed.