An Approach Based on Customized Robust Cloaked Region for Geographic Location Information Privacy Protection

Abstract

Location-based services (LBS) have gained huge popularity because of the easy availability of modern mobile devices and the fast development of geographical information science (GIS). However, the lack of protection for private user positions might give rise to privacy concerns. This kind of problem is especially serious in mobile application environment because many mobile applications tend to use LBS. In this paper, we propose a new privacy preserving approach using customized robust cloaked region (RCR), depending on a peer-to-peer structure and the premise that users do not trust each other when sharing their geographical locations. Two algorithms are used to generate the RCR with high user density. The area of the RCR is controlled by the user's demanded degree of protection. To enhance the resistance to regional background knowledge attack, we incorporate a location semantic value into each unit of the user map. According to extensive simulations, our method can effectively obfuscate a user's geographical location into a highly indistinguishable region because of the disturbance of nearby users and different equally possible locations.