Privacy Challenges in Third-Party Location Services

Abstract

The concern for location privacy in mobile applications is commonly motivated by a scenario in which a mobile device communicates personal location data, i.e. the device holder location, to a third party e.g. LBS provider, in exchange for some information service. We argue that this scenario offers a partial view of the actual risks for privacy, because in reality the information How can be more complex. For example, more and more often location is computed by a third party, the location provider, e.g. Google Location Service. Location providers are in the position of collecting huge amounts of location data from the users of diverse applications (e.g. Facebook and Foursquare to cite a few). This raises novel privacy concerns. In this paper, we discuss two issues related to the protection from location providers. The first focuses on the compliance of emerging location services standards with European data protection norms; the latter focuses on hard privacy solutions protecting from untrusted location providers.