| The rising popularity of social networks coupled with the explosive growth of wireless devices have enabled the creation of a whole new class of context-aware applications. The geographical location of a person can be coupled with their preferences and/or friendship data extracted from their social networking profile to build a variety of novel applications. In particular, wireless wearable devices can be made to reflect the preferences and friendship information of their owners, e.g. by generating customized context-dependent ashes, displays, or sound. However, the existing infrastructure to share social networking identification information via wireless can result in users compromising their privacy. In this paper, we present a SecureWear, a secure framework for sharing of social network information between wearable wireless devices without compromising user privacy and security. Through exchanging an encrypted nonce (EID) associated with a verified user location, SecureWear allows location-based services to query the local area for social network information without disclosing user identity or any set of information that could be positively matched to users. We achieve this capability even with the limited resources of a wearable device. We contend that integrating user privacy is crucial to the future of mobile social networks, and should be integrated early in the design cycle of mobile social networks. |
