Location Obfuscation for Location Data Privacy

Abstract

Advances in wireless internet, sensor technologies, mobile technologies, and global positioning technologies have renewed interest in location based services (LBSs) among mobile users. LBSs on smartphones allow consumers to locate nearby products and services, in exchange of their location information. Precision of location data helps for accurate query processing of LBSs but it may lead to severe security violations and several privacy threats, as intruders can easily determine user's common paths or actual locations. Encryption is the most explored approach for ensuring security. It can give protection against third party attacks but it cannot provide protection against privacy threats on the server which can still obtain user location and use it for malicious purposes. Location obfuscation is a technique to protect user privacy by altering the location of the users while preserving capability of server to compute few mathematical functions which are useful for the user over the obfuscated location information. This work mainly concentrates on LBSs which wants to know the distance travelled by user for providing their services and compares encryption and obfuscation techniques. This study proposes various methods of location obfuscation for GPS location data which are used to obfuscate user's path and location from service provider. Our work shows that user privacy can be maintained without affecting LBSs results, and without incurring significant overheads.