An adaptive grid-based approach to location privacy preservation

Abstract

Location privacy protection is a key factor to the development of location-based services. Location privacy relates to the protection of a user's identity, position, and path. In a grid-based approach, the user's position is obfuscated in a number of cells. However, this grid does not allow users to adjust the cell size which relates to a minimum privacy level. Therefore, it is hard to fix various privacy requirements from different users. This paper proposes a flexible-grid-based approach as well as an algorithm to protect the user's location privacy. However, the user can custom conveniently his grid due to his requirement of privacy. The overlap-area problem is also counted in the algorithm. By deeply investigating on our solution, we also discuss open research issues to make the solution feasible in the practice. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.