Location Privacy-Preserving Applications and Services

Abstract

Mobile location-based applications have recently prevailed due to the massive growth of the mobile devices and the mobile network. Such applications give the opportunity to the users to share content with the community which is coupled with their current geographical location. However, sharing such information might have serious privacy implications as an adversary might monitor the system and use such information to expose sensitive user information including user mobility traces and sensitive locations. This problem has led both the research community and the commercial mobile applications to develop several solutions to handle these privacy implications so as to enable users to disclose content without compromising their privacy. This chapter provides a survey of the state-of-the-art location-based mobile applications, describes the privacy implications that arise from contributing information in such applications and the respective existing countermeasures to deal with the privacy preservation issues. Furthermore, we describe our experiences from deploying a real-world location-based application that aims to allow the user contribute content and protect the user’s privacy.