Mobile Location Services Platform with Policy-Based Privacy Control

Abstract

Location service is unique to mobile systems, and is expected to increase mobile users. However, since location information is closely related to personal privacy issues, mobile operators are required to give careful consideration to privacy control when deploying location services into their network systems. Players related to location services are users, service providers and mobile operators. These players have different requirements in handling privacy information. In this paper, the authors propose to introduce the concept of granularity of information and a policy-based privacy control mechanism into location services platform. The proposed mechanism was implemented as an external gateway of mobile systems for prototyping, and scenarios for applying 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) and 3GPP2 systems are also studied.