Location-Based Trust for Mobile User-Generated Content: Applications, Challenges and Implementations

The recent explosion in shared media content and sensed data produced by mobile end-users is challenging well-established principles and assumptions in data trust models. A fundamental issue the authors address in this paper is how to establish some trust level in the authenticity of content created by untrusted mobile users. This paper advocates a secure localization and certification service that allows content producers to tag their content with a spatial timestamp indicating its physical location. At the same time, however, the approach preserves the privacy of producers by not exposing their identity to the potential content consumers.