Attacking Location Privacy: Exploring Human Strategies

Fechner T, Kray C

Abstract

The proliferation of location-based services in recent yearshas highlighted the need to consider location privacy. Thishas led to the development of methods enhancing locationprivacy, and to the investigation of reasons for sharing locationinformation. While computational attacks on locationprivacy and their prevention have attracted a lot of research,attacks based on humans strategies and tactics have mostlybeen considered implicitly. This note addresses this knowledgegap by reporting on a user study, which we conductedin the context of a location-based game. Participants hadto identify other players over the course of several weeks.The results show that human strategies for deanonymizationand re-identification can be highly successful and thus posea threat to location privacy comparable to computational attacks.By incorporating real-world knowledge (that is noteasily available in automated attacks), human players wereable to efficiently identify other people in the game.