Protecting privacy against location-based personal identification

Abstract

This paper presents a preliminary investigation on the privacy issues involved in the use of location-based services. It is argued that even if the user identity is not explicitly released to the service provider, the geo-localized history of user-requests can act as a quasi-identifier and may be used to access sensitive information about specific individuals. The paper formally defines a framework to evaluate the risk in revealing a user identity via location information and presents preliminary ideas about algorithms to prevent this to happen. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.