Preserving Anonymity in Location Based Services
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Date
2006-06-12
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Abstract
The increasing trend of embedding positioning capabilities (e.g., GPS) in mobile devices facilitates the widespread use of Location Based Services. For such applications to succeed, the privacy and confidentiality issues are of paramount importance. Existing techniques, like encryption, safeguard the communication channel from eavesdroppers. Nevertheless, the queries themselves may disclose the physical location, identity and habits of the user.
In this paper, we present a framework for preserving the anonymity of users issuing spatial queries to Location Based Services. We propose transformations based on the well-established K-anonymity technique to compute exact answers for Range and Nearest Neighbor queries, without revealing sensitive information about the user. Our methods optimize the entire process of anonymizing the requests and processing the transformed spatial queries. Extensive experimental studies suggest that our methods are applicable to real-life scenarios with numerous mobile users.