Approaches to privacy protection in location-based services

Abstract

Location-based services (LBS) introduce serious privacy threats, which need to be addressed before the users and the service providers can get full benefit of these promising services. We addressed this challenge by reviewing and analysing privacy protection solutions proposed in the literature. Based on the analysis, we identified three general approaches for implementing privacy protection in LBS: privacy parameters, data disclosure control algorithms and information architectures. Implementation of specific privacy protection methods based on these approaches have still many unsolved challenges, such as data precision requirements of different service types and technical issues in information architectures. In addition, we see that user centric approach should be emphasised in the future privacy protection method development, in order to foster users' trust to the services. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.