Privacy-Conscious Location-Based Queries in Mobile Environments

— In location-based services, users with location-aware mobile devices are able to make queries about their surroundings anywhere and at any time. While this ubiquitous computing paradigm brings great convenience for information access, it also raises concerns over potential intrusion into user location privacy. To protect location privacy, one typical approach is to cloak user locations into spatial regions based on user-specified privacy requirements, and to transform location-based queries into region-based queries. In this paper, we identify and address three new issues concerning this location cloaking approach. First, we study the representation of cloaking regions and show that a circular region generally leads to a small result size for regionbased queries. Second, we develop a mobility-aware location cloaking technique to resist trace analysis attacks. Two cloaking algorithms, namely MaxAccu Cloak and MinComm Cloak, are designed based on different performance objectives. Fi...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: TPDS
• Authors: Jianliang Xu, Xueyan Tang, Haibo Hu, Jing Du
• Keywords: Cloaking, Cloaking Algorithms, Query Processing Mode, TPDS 2010