Protecting Smartphone Users’ Private Locations Through Caching

Abstract

Smartphones equipped with advanced positioning technology continuously collect users’ location information and make that information easily accessible to third party app and/or library developers. Users are becoming increasingly aware of the resultant privacy threats, and demanding effective privacy preserving solutions that will allow them to securely use location-based services. In addition, academic and industrial communities are paying special attention to the development of more friendly and socially-accepted approaches to location privacy. In this work, we model, design and evaluate LP-Caché, a mobile platform based service that protects locations by modifying the location resource handling process. It applies caching technique to protect users’ private locations and establishes personalised location permission controls. We define the design decisions and implementation requirements towards the viability and feasibility of the model deployment. We also evaluate resources and storage requirements in order to minimise the computational and communication overheads. Empirical results of 2 months comparative study show a 2.26% change in the network fingerprints at 34 distinct places that required only 2.07% change in the overall cache storage. Both these results demonstrate feasibility of the model.