Paper Info
Title
Uncovering hidden social relationships through location-based services: The Happn case study
Abstract
Every day we publish an impressive amount of information about ourselves online: Pictures, videos, tweets, posts, and check-ins. These (big) data tell the story of our public lives and, at first, are seemingly innocuous. Nonetheless, they reveal a great deal of information about the things that we wished to remain private too. The goal of this work is to demonstrate how an attacker can exploit these data to jeopardize our privacy. In particular, we focus on Happn, a location-based dating app that counts millions of users worldwide. Happn's goal is to let us find other users in our surroundings. It shows us their first name, age, and gender, their pictures, and their short bio. In addition, it tells us their approximate distance from our current location. By exploiting this information we show how an attacker (a stalker, a data broker, an advertisement company, etc.) can expose the private lives of Happn users and pinpoint their geographic position accurately and in real-time. In fact, we demonstrate how he can get even more detailed knowledge about the users by targeting all the population from a specific region (a city or a country) to discover their daily routines, where they work, where they live, and where they have fun. Finally, we show how to find out the social relationships between the Happn users: Uncovering who their friends, colleagues, relatives, and flatmates are.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1109/INFCOMW.2018.8406866
IEEE INFOCOM 2018 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS)
Keywords
Field
DocType
location-based services,Happn case study,Happn users,hidden social relationships,Big data,location-based dating app,data privacy
Publication,Population,Social relationship,Internet privacy,Computer science,Location-based service,Exploit,Information privacy,Big data
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
2159-4228
978-1-5386-5980-9
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
7
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Adriano Di Luzio171.57
Alessandro Mei230516.96
Julinda Stefa347725.18