A game-theoretic framework to preserve location information privacy in location-based service applications

Abstract

Recently, the growing ubiquity of location-based service (LBS) technology has increased the likelihood of users’ privacy breaches due to the exposure of their real-life information to untrusted third parties. Extensive use of such LBS applications allows untrusted third-party adversarial entities to collect large quantities of information regarding users’ locations over time, along with their identities. Due to the high risk of private information leakage using resource-constrained smart mobile devices, most LBS users may not be adequately encouraged to access all LBS applications. In this paper, we study the use of game theory to protect users against private information leakage in LBSs due to malicious or selfish behavior of third-party observers. In this study, we model a scenario of privacy protection gameplay between a privacy protector and an outside visitor and then derive the situation of the prisoner’s dilemma game to analyze the traditional privacy protection problems. Based on the analysis, we determine the corresponding benefits to both players using a point of view that allows the visitor to access a certain amount of information and denies further access to the user’s private information when exposure of privacy is forthcoming. Our proposed model uses the collection of private information about historical access data and current LBS access scenario to effectively determine the probability that the visitor’s access is an honest one. Moreover, we present the procedures involved in the privacy protection model and framework design, using game theory for decision-making. Finally, by employing a comparison analysis, we perform some experiments to assess the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed game-theoretic model over the traditional solutions.