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