A Location Privacy Aware Friend Locator

A location-based service called friend-locator notifies a user if the user is geographically close to any of the user’s friends. Services of this kind are getting increasingly popular due to the penetration of GPS in mobile phones, but existing commercial friend-locator services require users to trade their location privacy for quality of service, limiting the attractiveness of the services. The challenge is to develop a communication-efficient solution such that (i) it detects proximity between a user and the user’s friends, (ii) any other party is not allowed to infer the location of the user, and (iii) users have flexible choices of their proximity detection distances. To address this challenge, we develop a client-server solution for proximity detection based on an encrypted, grid-based mapping of locations. Experimental results show that our solution is indeed efficient and scalable to a large number of users.