Combining spatial cloaking and dummy generation for location privacy preserving

Abstract

Location privacy preserving is attracting more and more attentions with the wide use of accurate positioning devices. Two kinds of methods based on k-anonymity have been proposed for location privacy preserving. One is spatial cloaking and the other is dummy generation. However, simple cloaking may result in large cloaking region, especially when user distribution is sparse. Large cloaking region means low efficiency and high time cost. Dummy generation will also arouse great extra system cost. In this paper, we propose an approach that combines the two techniques to achieve an ideal complement. On one hand, cloaking algorithm is used to blur precise location into a region so that location privacy can be well protected. On the other hand, to those users whose cloaking region is large, generating limited number of dummies can help decrease the size of region. The effectiveness of our methods has been demonstrated by comprehensive experiments. © Springer-Verlag 2012.