Section: New Results

Inspect what your location history reveals about you - Raising user awareness on privacy threats associated with disclosing his location data

Participant : Antoine Boutet.

Location is one of the most extensively collected personal data on mobile by applications and third-party services. However, how the location of users is actually processed in practice by the actors of targeted advertising ecosystem remains unclear. Nonetheless, these providers have a strong incentive to create very detailed profile of users to better monetize the collected data. End users are usually not aware about the strength and wide range of inference that can be performed from their mobility traces. In this work, users interact with a web-based application to inspect their location history and to discover the inferential power of this kind of data. Moreover to better understand the possible countermeasures, users can apply a sanitization to protect their data and visualize the impact on both the mobility traces and the associated inferred information. The objective of this work is to raise the user awareness on the profiling capabilities and the privacy threats associated with disclosing his location data as well as how sanitization mechanisms can be efficient to mitigate these privacy risks. In addition, by collecting users feedbacks on the personal information revealed and the usage of a geosanitization mechanism, we hope that this work will also be useful to constitute a new and valuable dataset on users perceptions on these questions.