Privacy protection through anonymity in location-based services

Abstract

The adoption of location-based services (LBS) brings new privacy threats to users. The user location information revealed in LBS requests may be used by attackers to associate sensitive information of the user with her identity. This contribution focuses on privacy protection through anonymity, i.e., keeping individual users indistinguishable in a large group of people that may have issued the same request. The contribution identifies different privacy threats to LBS users, discusses techniques for protecting user privacy under different threats, and gives a performance evaluation of the mentioned protection methods. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.