SpotME If You Can: Randomized Responses for Location Obfuscation on Mobile Phones

Abstract—Nowadays companies increasingly aggregate location data from different sources on the Internet to offer locationbased services such as estimating current road traffic conditions, and finding the best nightlife locations in a city. However, these services have also caused outcries over privacy issues. As the volume of location data being aggregated expands, the comfort of sharing one’s whereabouts with the public at large will unavoidably decrease. Existing ways of aggregating location data in the privacy literature are largely centralized in that they rely on a trusted location-based service. Instead, we propose a piece of software (SpotME) that can run on a mobile phone and is able to estimate the number of people in geographic locations in a privacy-preserving way: accurate estimations are made possible in the presence of privacy-conscious users who report, in addition to their actual locations, a very large number of erroneous locations. The erroneous locations are se...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: ICDCS
• Authors: Daniele Quercia, Ilias Leontiadis, Liam McNamara, Cecilia Mascolo, Jon Crowcroft
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, ICDCS 2011, Location Based Service, Subway Train, Train Passengers