Location privacy models in mobile applications: conceptual view and research directions

Abstract

Location privacy in mobile, location-aware applications is a prominent research topic spanning across different disciplines and with strong societal implications and expectations. The tumultuous growth of the mobile applications market over the past few years has however hindered the development of a systematic organization and classification of location privacy concepts. In this paper we focus on one of the key concepts, i.e. location privacy metric. We survey existing approaches to the measurement of location privacy and propose a classification framework. The notion of location privacy metric, however, cannot be fully understood without describing the context in which these metrics are used. To that extent we elaborate on the notions of application model and privacy model. The ultimate goal is to contribute to the specification of a conceptual framework for location privacy.