Preserving Location Privacy Using Blockchain

Abstract

With the advancement of technology and enhanced techniques of the global positioning system, the use of location-based services has significantly increased in the last decade. With the increase in the use of these services, there is also a rise in concern for the preservation of location privacy. There have been some cases where location data was disclosed, which even led to some serious crimes. Preservation of location privacy becomes a must in these situations. There are various techniques for preserving location privacy. Some use an anonymizer in between location-based services (LBS) and user, while other uses a distributed architecture for preserving location privacy. In this paper, a blockchain-based decentralized architecture for preserving location privacy is proposed. Earlier users had to trust either the anonymizer or the LBS for retrieving the query results, but with this proposed solution, advancement toward zero trust model would be possible.