CT-ISG: A Game Theoretic Framework for Privacy Preservation in Community-Based Mobile Applications

移动设备的爆炸式增长，加上近乎普遍的连接，为基于社区的移动社交网络应用创造了新的机会。在这类应用程序中，社区中的每个用户都贡献了他们对周围环境的知识，而集体知识被小组成员用于个人或社会利益。所有移动社交网络的基础是参与者希望利用从社区中其他用户那里获得的集体知识。然而，随着安全担忧的增长，人们希望保护自己的隐私。因此，所有移动社交网络都存在隐私和信息效用之间的根本紧张关系。这种紧张关系可以很好地表述为博弈论问题，即自利主体的行为会根据系统中其他主体的行为而动态改变。本研究将探讨纳什均衡的存在性和效率，并设计能够在满足用户隐私关注的同时最大化应用程序性能的机制。特别地，本研究是在两个具体案例研究的背景下进行的：一个关于基于移动设备的实时车辆交通信息应用，另一个关于基于社区的增强人身安全的移动应用。这项研究将提供一个重要的概念证明，即严格的博弈论分析和设计方法可以导致实际系统在隐私和用户服务之间提供适当的权衡。从这个项目中吸取的经验教训将广泛地用于开发下一代基于社交参与的移动设备应用程序。

The explosive growth of mobile devices coupled with near universal connectivity creates new opportunities for community based mobile social networking applications. In this class of applications each user in a community contributes their knowledge about their surrounding environments and the collective knowledge is used by the group members for a personal or social benefit. The foundational underpinning of all mobile social networks is a participant's desire to take advantage of the collective knowledge gained from other users in the community. However, as security concerns grow there is a desire to protect one's own privacy. Thus all mobile social networks have a fundamental tension between privacy and information utility. This tension can be well formulated as a game theory problem where a self-interested agent's behavior alters dynamically based on the behavior of other agents in the system. This research will investigate the existence and efficiency of Nash equilibria and also design mechanisms that can maximize application performance while satisfying the privacy concerns of users. In particular, this research is conducted in the context of two specific case studies: one pertaining to a mobile device-based real time vehicular traffic information application and another pertaining to a community based mobile application for enhancing personal safety. This research will provide an important proof-of-concept that a rigorous game-theoretic analysis and designmethodology can lead to practical systems to provide appropriate tradeoffs between privacy and user service. The lessons learned in this project will be broadly useful to the development of next-generation social participation-based applications for mobile devices.