Achieving Efficient Query Privacy for Location Based Services

Mobile smartphone users frequently need to search for nearby points of interest from a location based service, but in a way that preserves the privacy of the users' locations. We present a technique for private information retrieval that allows a user to retrieve information from a database server without revealing what is actually being retrieved from the server. We perform the retrieval operation in a computationally efficient manner to make it practical for resource-constrained hardware such as smartphones, which have limited processing power, memory, and wireless bandwidth. In particular, our algorithm makes use of a variable-sized cloaking region that increases the location privacy of the user at the cost of additional computation, but maintains the same traffic cost. Our proposal does not require the use of a trusted thirdparty component, and ensures that we find a good compromise between user privacy and computational efficiency. We evaluated our approach with a proof-of-c...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: PET
• Authors: Femi G. Olumofin, Piotr K. Tysowski, Ian Goldberg, Urs Hengartner
• Keywords: Location Based Service, Location Privacy, Mobile Smartphone Users, PET 2010, Security Privacy