Self-Reliant Location Privacy Techniques In Location Based Mobile Applications

Abstract

Tiny hardware of global positioning almost fitted in every mobile device these days which is carried by humans, animals, vehicles and for that matter, any moving objects. Based on this feasibility of location in devices, many location aided applications are being used these days. But revealing location to various service providers to be part of quality of service, pose threat of location privacy. Privacy has got many dimensions including laws, social attitude, governance, commerce and technical. Authors have tried to address above parameters to balance privacy. Revealing location to distributed, trusted parties is also a threat. That is why users' device should be reliant to work for self-motivated privacy. Our proposed work provides location privacy to the LBS users without using any third party for anonymization. Cloaking mechanisms are suggested with different parameters such as location plaintext in group, location noise, and encryption. Customization is studied that progressively increase the privacy levels. The user can use any of the module depending on the context it is requesting the LBS. Prototype is demonstrated with LBS system and Mobile emulations and delay, communication cost, privacy strength is measured and analyzed among these parameters variation.