PROS: A Peer-to-Peer System for Location Privacy Protection on Road Networks

The k-anonymity technique is widely used to provide location privacy protection for accessing location-based services (LBS), i.e., the exact location of a query initiator is cloaked into a spatial region that contains at least k indistinguishable users. However, a centralized location anonymizer may pose serious privacy threats and could be the system bottleneck. Moreover, many cloaking methods are developed for the Euclidean space and fail to consider the features of road networks. In this demonstration, we present the technologies and implementations which protect location privacy by peer-to-peer based cloaking on road networks. We name the prototype system as PROS. With PROS, a mobile user forms a cloaked road segment set by collaborating with her peers when she needs to retrieve information from location-based service providers. Afterward, the cloaked road segment set is sent to the service provider for query processing and an inclusive query result set is returned to the query in...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: GIS
• Authors: Jie Bao 0003, Haiquan Chen, Wei-Shinn Ku
• Keywords: Cloaked Road Segment, Database, GIS 2009, Location Privacy, Query Initiator