Location Privacy-Preserving Mechanism - A Data-Driven Approach

Location privacy is defined as the right of individuals to decide how, when, and for what purpose their location information could be released to other parties. Location-based services (LBSs) are emerging rapidly with the proliferation of mobile application, and the problems with privacy are growing with them. Location information is one of the most fundamental pieces of contextual data, and it is used to drive an extensive variety of applications. So, when location systems track users automatically and continuously, a huge amount of potentially sensitive information is generated which may be used in profiling & revealing user identity based on their location updates. Users do not necessarily intend to stop complete access to their location information, since some applications may need this information to provide useful services. However, the users would want to have control over the details of location used. Encryption/cryptographic techniques on location data & Location obfuscation which can be done reversibly or irreversibly using Trusted-Third Party (TTP) servers are the most common approaches explored which can give protection against third party attacks but it cannot provide protection against privacy threats on the server which can still obtain user location and use it for maleficent purposes. The lack of location privacy protection could be exploited by adversaries to perform various attacks. In this paper, we propose a technique by which the user can be provided control over the precision with which user can provide access to its location information and propose a mechanism enabling granular control of privacy for any LBS application without limiting its serviceability.