Private queries in location based services: anonymizers are not necessary

Mobile devices equipped with positioning capabilities (e.g., GPS) can ask location-dependent queries to Location Based Services (LBS). To protect privacy, the user location must not be disclosed. Existing solutions utilize a trusted anonymizer between the users and the LBS. This approach has several drawbacks: (i) All users must trust the third party anonymizer, which is a single point of attack. (ii) A large number of cooperating, trustworthy users is needed. (iii) Privacy is guaranteed only for a single snapshot of user locations; users are not protected against correlation attacks (e.g., history of user movement). We propose a novel framework to support private locationdependent queries, based on the theoretical work on Private Information Retrieval (PIR). Our framework does not require a trusted third party, since privacy is achieved via cryptographic techniques. Compared to existing work, our approach achieves stronger privacy for snapshots of user locations; moreover, it is the ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: Gabriel Ghinita, Panos Kalnis, Ali Khoshgozaran, Cyrus Shahabi, Kian-Lee Tan
• Keywords: Database, Provable Privacy Guarantees, Query Privacy Permission, SIGMOD 2008, Stronger Privacy