Location privacy in smart cities era

Abstract

In recent years, smart city concept was proposed to provide sustainable development to the cities and improve the quality of citizens’ life by utilizing the information and communication technologies. To achieve that, smart city applications are expected to use IoT infrastructure to collect and integrate data continuously about the environment and citizens, and take actions based on the constructed knowledge. Indeed, identification and tracking technologies are essential to develop such context-aware applications. Therefore, citizens are expected to be surrounded by smart devices which continuously identify, track and process their daily activities. Location privacy is one of the important issues which should be addressed carefully. Preserving location privacy means that the released sensitive location data of citizens are used only for the desired purpose. In reality, adopting the citizens’ for smart city applications depends on their trust on the used technologies. In this paper, we review smart city architectures, frameworks, and platforms to highlight to what extent preserving location privacy is addressed. We show that preserving location privacy in smart city applications does not get the required attention. We discuss the issues, which we think should be addressed to improve location privacy preservation for smart city applications. Accordingly, we propose a location privacy preservation system for smart city applications.