Mobile User Location Inference Attacks Fusing with Multiple Background Knowledge in Location-Based Social Networks

Location-based social networks have been widely used. However, due to the lack of effective and safe data management, a large number of privacy disclosures commonly occur. Thus, academia and industry have needed to focus more on location privacy protection. This paper proposes a novel location attack method using multiple background options to infer the hidden locations of mobile users. In order to estimate the possibility of a hidden position being visited by a user, two hidden location attack models are proposed, i.e., a Bayesian hidden location inference model and the multi-factor fusion based hidden location inference model. Multiple background factors, including the check-in sequences, temporal information, user social networks, personalized service preferences, point of interest (POI) popularities, etc., are considered in the two models. Moreover, a hidden location inference algorithm is provided as well. Finally, a series of experiments are conducted on two real check-in data examples to evaluate the accuracy of the model and verify the validity of the proposed algorithm. The experimental results show that multiple background knowledge fusion provides benefits for improving location inference precision.