Your Neighbors Are My Spies: Location and other Privacy Concerns in Dating Apps
This work tackles privacy risks for users of dating apps, but it appears incremental as it focuses on evaluating existing countermeasures rather than proposing new solutions.
The paper investigates the effectiveness of privacy protections in location-based dating apps, specifically testing Jack'd and Grindr, to address concerns about trilateration threats to user location privacy.
Trilateration has recently become one of the well-known threat models to the user's location privacy in location-based applications (aka: location-based services or LBS), especially those containing highly sensitive information such as dating applications. The threat model mainly depends on the distance shown from the targeted victim to the adversary to pinpoint the victim's position. As a countermeasure, most of location-based applications have already implemented the "hide distance" function to protect their user's location privacy. The effectiveness of such approaches however is still questionable. Therefore, in this paper, we first investigate how popular location-based dating applications are currently protecting their user's privacy by testing the two most popular GLBT-focused applications: Jack'd and Grindr.