Protecting location privacy through semantics-aware obfuscation techniques

Abstract

The widespread adoption of location-based services (LBS) raises increasing concerns for the protection of personal location information. To protect location privacy the usual strategy is to obfuscate the actual position of the user with a coarse location and then forward the obfuscated location to the LBS provider. Existing techniques for location obfuscation are only based on geometric methods.We state that such techniques do not protect against privacy attacks rooted in the knowledge of the spatial context. We thus present a novel framework for the safeguard of sensitive locations comprehensive of a privacy model and an algorithm for the computation of obfuscated locations. Copyright © 2008 by International Federation for Information Processing.