H-LPS: a hybrid approach for user's location privacy in location-based services

Abstract

Applications providing location-based services (LBS) have gained much attention and importance with the notion of the internet of things (IoT). Users are utilising LBS by providing their location information to third-party service providers. However, location data is very sensitive that can reveal user's private life to adversaries. The passive and pervasive data collection in IoT upsurges serious issues of location privacy. Privacy-preserving location-based services is a hot research topic. Many anonymisation and obfuscation techniques have proposed to overcome location privacy issue. In this paper, we have proposed a hybrid location privacy scheme (H-LPS), a hybrid scheme mainly based on obfuscation and collaboration for protecting user's location privacy while using location-based services. Obfuscation naturally degrades the quality of service, but provides more privacy as compared to anonymisation. Our proposed scheme, H-LPS, provides a very high level privacy yet providing a good accuracy for most of the users. Privacy level and service accuracy of H-LPS is compared with state of the art location privacy schemes and it is showed that H-LPS could be a candidate solution for preserving user's location privacy in location-based services.