INGI Seminar - Tell Me How You Move, I Will Tell You Who You Are

"Tell Me How You Move, I Will Tell You Who You Are: Latest Advances in Location Privacy Protection Mechanisms"

by Sonia Ben Mokhtar, LIRIS/INSA Lyon.

The widespread adoption of continuously connected smartphones and tablets drove the adoption of mobile applications, among which many use location to provide a geolocated service. The usefulness of these services is no more to be demonstrated; getting directions to work in the morning, leaving a check-in at a restaurant at noon and checking next day’s weather in the evening is possible right from any mobile device embedding a GPS chip. In these applications, locations are sent to a server often hosted on untrusted cloud platforms, which uses them to provide personalized answers.

However, nothing prevents these platforms from gathering, analyzing and possibly sharing the collected information. This opens the door for many threats, as location information allows to infer sensitive information about users, among which one’s home, work place or even religious/political preferences. For this reason, many schemes have been proposed these last years to enhance location privacy while still allowing people to enjoy geolocated services. During this presentation, I will present the latest advances in location privacy protection mechanisms and give some insights on open challenges and under-explored questions.

Sonia Ben Mokhtar is a CNRS tenure researcher and the head of the Distributed Systems and Information Retrieval group (DRIM) of the Laboratoire d'InfoRmatique en Image et Systèmes d'information (LIRIS) located in Lyon. Before joining the LIRIS lab in 2009, Sonia Ben Mokhtar obtained her PhD from Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris 6) in 2007 and was part of the MiMove INRIA team. After that, Sonia was a research associate at University College London (GB) in the Software Systems Engineering Group for two years. Since the beginning of her career Sonia Ben Mokhtar has co-authored more than 40 international publications, led multiple national and European projects and co-supervised about 10 PhD students. Her research topics include dependable distributed systems and privacy-preserving systems. She is the vice chair of the French ACM SIGOPS chapter since 2012.