L2M NSERC - PrivyTo: Location Privacy Reimagined

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Concern over the privacy of one's personal location is at an all-time high, yet the desire to share our lives with friends, family, and the public persists. Online services constantly ask users to share their location via their mobile devices, forcing them to weigh the cost of sharing this information against the possible benefits. Current platforms for sharing location content (e.g., Google, Facebook) with the range of people in our lives are sorely lacking. Most offer users a single choice: either share your precise geographic coordinates with someone or don't share your location at all. Even applications like Twitter and Instagram only offer limited options for geo-tagging content, typically restricting to nearby places of interest or one's current city. These limited options do not reflect the wide range of personal, professional, and social relationships that exist. One's level of comfort in sharing their location with an acquaintance is very different than with their spouse. Furthermore, processes for sharing typically involve allowing a large commercial company access to your location before it can be transmitted to the intended recipients. To many (especially at-risk individual), the idea of publicly sharing personal location information via one of these limited options is deeply concerning. PrivyTo is a platform that places individuals back in control of their personal location privacy allowing them the freedom to share their location securely and with varying degrees of privacy. Our approach is built on the novel idea of obfuscated and encrypted location views, and promotes a uniquely open method for sharing. A user can share their encrypted location with a variety of individuals (e.g., family, friends, the public). Different keys unlock different views of their location. The public may see my current city, while friends might see my neighbourhood, and my family would have access to my precise geographic coordinates. The entire process is encrypted end-to-end so that no third party application has access to an individual's location. This proposal is to fund entrepreneurial education and market research related to this project idea.