Protecting location privacy through a graph-based location representation and a robust obfuscation technique

Abstract

With technical advancement of location technologies and their widespread adoption, information regarding physical location of individuals is becoming more available, augmenting the development and growth of location-based services. As a result of such availability, threats to location privacy are increasing, entailing more robust and sophisticated solutions capable of providing users with straightforward yet flexible privacy. The ultimate objective of this work is to design a privacy- preserving solution, based on obfuscation techniques (imprecision and inaccuracy), capable of handling location privacy, as required by users and according to their preferences. To this aim, we propose an intuitive graph-based location model, based on which users can express their regional privacy preferences. We present an obfuscation-based solution which allows us to achieve location privacy through degradation of location information, as well as measuring the reliability of such information. The proposed approach is robust and efficient, and covers some of the deficiencies of current obfuscation-based privacy solutions. We also propose two privacy-aware architectures for our solution. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.