LAUSR

An original sender's location-disclosure is a major privacy issue in vehicular social networks when people are interested in location-aware services. In this paper, we first propose a basic social-aware location-privacy protection (B-SLP) method in vehicular social networks. This method enables trustworthy users to obfuscate an original sender's location with the help of their regions. Then, we provide an improved SLP (I-SLP) to reduce the size of the cloaking area by covering at least k − 1 trustworthy users, while maintaining a required level of privacy protection. Due to disclosure of their locations, selfish users may not help the original sender as they put themselves at risks. To stimulate more trustworthy users to join in the location obfuscation, we then propose encouraging SLP (E-SLP) where each trustworthy user can increase and/or decrease its social tie according to its behavior (cooperation or no-cooperation). Experiments show that B-SLP, I-SLP, E-SLP can improve the query success ratio compared to the existing method, while maintaining a required level of privacy protection.