A new cloaking method based on weighted adjacency graph for preserving user location privacy in LBS

Abstract

The propagation of position identifying devices, such as Global Positioning System (GPS), becomes increasingly a privacy threat in location-based services (LBSs). However, in order to enjoy such services, the user must precisely disclose his/her exact location to the LBS. So, it is a key challenge to efficiently preserve user's privacy while accessing LBS. For this, the existing method employs a framework that not only hides the actual user location but also reduces bandwidth consumption. However, it suffers from privacy attack for a long term observation of user behaviour. Therefore, we aim to provide the solutions which can preserve user privacy by utilizing k-anonymity mechanism. In this paper, we propose a weighted adjacency graph based k-anonymous cloaking technique that can provide protection to user and also reduce bandwidth usages. Our cloaking approach efficiently supports k-nearest neighbor queries without revealing private information of the query initiator. We demonstrate via experimental results that our algorithm yields much better performance than the existing one. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media.