BlueStar, a privacy centric location aware system

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004

We present a low cost and easily deployed infrastructure for location aware computing that is built using standard Bluetooth technologies and personal computers. Mobile devices are able to determine their location to room-level granularity with existing bluetooth technology, and to even greater resolution with the use of the recently adopted bluetooth 1.2 specification, all while maintaining complete anonymity. Various techniques for improving the speed and resolution of the system are described, along with their tradeoffs in privacy. The system is trivial to implement on a large scale-our network covering 5,000 square meters was deployed by a single student over the course of a few days at a cost of less than US¡ 1,000.

IEEE Pervasive Computing, 2003

ABSTRACT Wireless network hotspots, such as 802.11 b WiFi access points, can be used as beacons that provide an inexpensive, large-scale, and privacy-sensitive way of determining one's current location. This approach, however, requires creating and storing databases of a large number of access point locations, which raises ethical and legal questions over the privacy of the network. In this paper, we analyze the privacy risks for end-users in such a system.

Procedia Computer Science, 2011

A portable device user, Alice, is travelling and wishes to get local information on points of interest (e.g. restaurants, hotels) from a location based service, but without a violation of her privacy. Furthermore, Alice wishes to maintain a presence at home. We present a system that allows a local user, either at her destination or in her home city, to act as a relay for Alice without revealing her identity either to the relay or to the location based service. The system relies on a central server and implements a reputation system to reward relays.

2002

2013

This paper describes a new model for sharing location info for mobile users. This approach can operate without the need for disclosing identity info to third party servers. It could be described as a safe location sharing model. The proposed approach creates a special form of distributed database that splits location info and identity information. In this distributed data store identity info is always saved locally. It eliminates one of the main concerns with location-based systems - privacy. This paper describes a model itself as well as its implementation in the form of HTML5 mobile web application.

2002

Dynamic & mobile GIS: investigating change …, 2006

Proceedings of the 35th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

This paper presents an architecture for location aware applications, where positioning sources such as GPS, WaveLAN and Bluetooth devices can be seamlessly interchanged or even combined to achieve a more accurate positioning service with a higher availability than a single positioning source could provide. The architecture also supports peer-to-peer communication to allow clients to interchange position information over a local wireless network such as Bluetooth or WaveLAN. This enables a user to use other users position sources if their clients are close enough. The position information can be used directly by an application or be combined with habitual and other contextual information to achieve more personalized applications. A generic positioning protocol for interchange of position information between position sources and client applications is introduced and different techniques for merging of position information are presented. The interfaces for an application to access the platform and the platform to communicate with positioning sources are also discussed. The paper finally touches on privacy issues and outlines a schema for handling positioning information by using contracts that are easily maintained and controlled by the user.

Privacy Enhancing Technologies

Location privacy is of utmost concern for location-based services. It is the property that a person's location is revealed to other entities, such as a service provider or the person's friends, only if this release is strictly necessary and authorized by the person. We study how to achieve location privacy for a service that alerts people of nearby friends. Here, location privacy guarantees that users of the service can learn a friend's location if and only if the friend is actually nearby. We introduce three protocols-Louis, Lester and Pierre-that provide location privacy for such a service. The key advantage of our protocols is that they are distributed and do not require a separate service provider that is aware of people's locations. The evaluation of our sample implementation demonstrates that the protocols are sufficiently fast to be practical.