Your Neighbors Are My Spies: Location and other Privacy Concerns in GLBT-focused Location-based Dating Applications
This addresses privacy concerns for vulnerable populations using sensitive location-based apps, but appears incremental as it builds on known threats and existing countermeasures.
The paper tackles the problem of location privacy threats in GLBT-focused dating apps, specifically through trilateration attacks, and questions the effectiveness of current countermeasures like hiding or adding noise to distances.
Trilateration is one of the well-known threat models to the user's location privacy in location-based apps, especially those contain highly sensitive information such as dating apps. The threat model mainly bases on the publicly shown distance from a targeted victim to the adversary to pinpoint the victim's location. As a countermeasure, most of location-based apps have already implemented the 'hide distance' function, or added noise to the publicly shown distance in order to protect their user's location privacy. The effectiveness of such approaches however is still questionable.