location privacy in ubiquitous computing

2009 29th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, 2009

We address issues related to privacy protection in location-based services (LBS). Most existing research in this field either requires a trusted third-party (anonymizer) or uses oblivious protocols which are computationally and communicationally expensive. Our design of privacy-preserving techniques is principled on not requiring a trusted third-party while being highly efficient in terms of time and space complexities. The problem has two interesting and challenging characteristics: First, the degree of privacy protection and LBS accuracy depends on the context, such as population and road density, around a user's location. Second, an adversary may violate a user's location privacy in two ways: (i) based on the user's location information contained in the LBS query payload, and (ii) by inferring a user's geographical location based on its device's IP address. To address these challenges, we introduce CAP, a Context-Aware Privacy-preserving LBS system with integrated protection for data privacy and communication anonymity. We have implemented CAP and integrated it with Google Maps, a popular LBS system. Theoretical analysis and experimental results validate CAP's effectiveness on privacy protection, LBS accuracy, and communication Quality-of-Service.

2008

Abstract The topic addressed in this thesis concerns the relationship between spatial knowledge and information protection in a mobile setting. The proliferation of mobile devices in an increasingly connected world raises growing concern for information security and privacy. For example, sensitive data recorded in corporate and networked information systems can be accessed from uncontrolled locations, downloaded on mobile terminals and disclosed to unauthorized third parties.

The International Series in Engineering and Computer Science, 2005

Place Lab is a system for positioning a user based on passive monitoring of 802.11 access points. Place Lab seeks preserve the user's privacy by preventing disclosures, even to "trusted" systems in the infrastructure. We are pursing two avenues to explore these and other privacy issues in the domain of sociallyoriented applications. We are doing fieldwork to understand user needs and preferences as well as developing applications with significant, fundamental privacy concerns in order to expose the strengths and weaknesses in our approach.

As per the growth of mobile devices related with a GPS receiver, a large number of location based services (LBSs) have been launched. Since location information may private information, preserving location privacy has become a significant issue. Previously studied methods to preserve a users' privacy; physical constraints are not taken in consideration for most of them. In this paper, we constantly focus on such constraints and purpose of a location privacy preservation method which can be applicable to a real environment. In particular, our method anonymizes the user's location which generates dummies which we simulate to behave like an real human. The model also considers traceability of the user's locations which can quickly recover from an accidental reveal of the user's location. We are conducting an experiment using five users' real GPS trajectories and are compared our method relating to previous studies. The results shows that our method establish to anonymize the user's location within a pre-determined range. It also avoids fixing the relative positions of the user and dummies, it can also give a hint to an LBS provider which can identify the real users. In addition, we can conduct a user experiment with 22 participants to evaluate the power or heptiness of our method against humans. Weak participants to observe movements of a user and dummies and try to find the real user. As a result, we confirmed that our method can anonymize the users' locations even against human's observation.

Global journal of computer science and technology, 2019

Recent advancements in technology have opened new avenues for services like the Location based services. Location based services are applications of mobile technology that utilize the information about the location of the user. It uses the Global Positioning System GPS to acquire and transmit user location. Billions of people create an unprecedented amount of data that either includes or allows the inference of highly sensitive information amidst which user location is one of them. However, this information is shared with third party without the knowledge or consent of the user. This is a violation of privacy as some users will or may not want to disclose their location to some people. This paper aims to raise awareness about privacy issues created as a result of location based services. History of location based services were discussed, information privacy and privacy issue surrounding the location based service were also discussed. Despite the myriad opportunities location based s...

2011

Smartphones define a trend towards increasing combination and integration of sensing capabilities with almost ubiquitous inter-connectivity. Resulting location-based services and context-aware applications will benefit users by adapting better to the user application needs. However, there is a lack of effective means for controlling privacy in such systems which will likely increase further with future ubiquitous computing systems. Territorial privacy is a concept that moves away from the information-centric view in traditional systems to a context-centric approach. In this paper, we define and model territorial privacy in the context of ubiquitous computing. We further discuss potential observers and disturbers in our model and provide an overview on how territorial privacy can be controlled in different environments, ranging from personal to public.

2009

Mobile phones are increasingly becoming tools for social interaction. As more phones come equipped with location tracking capabilities, capable of collecting and distributing personal information (including location) of their users, user control of location information and privacy for that matter, has become an important research issue. This research first explores various techniques of user control of location in location-based systems, and proposes the re-conceptualisation of deception (defined here as the deliberate withholding of location information) from information systems security to the field of location privacy. Previous work in this area considers techniques such as anonymisation, encryption, cloaking and blurring, among others. Since mobile devices have become social tools, this thesis takes a different approach by empirically investigating first the likelihood of the use of the proposed technique (deception) in protecting location privacy. We present empirical results (...

Nowadays mobile users are using a popular service called Location-Based Services (LBS). LBS is very helpful for a mobile user in finding various Point of Interests (POIs) in their vicinity. To get these services, users must provide their personal information, such as user identity or current location, which severely risks the location privacy of the user. Many researchers are developing schemes that enable a user to use these LBS services anonymously, but these approaches have some limitations (i.e., either the privacy prevention mechanism is weak or the cost of the solution is too much). As such, we are presenting a robust scheme for mobile users that allows them to use LBS anonymously. Our scheme involves a client side application that interacts with an untrusted LBS server to find the nearest POI for a service required by a user. The scheme is not only efficient in its approach, but is also very practical with respect to the computations that are done on a client’s resource constrained device. With our scheme, not only can a client anonymously use LBS without any use of a trusted third party, but also a server’s database is completely secure from the client. We performed experiments by developing and testing an Android-based client side smartphone application to support our argument.

Computer Networks, 2012

We address issues related to privacy protection in location-based services (LBSs). Most existing privacy-preserving LBS techniques either require a trusted third-party (anonymizer) or use cryptographic protocols that are computationally and communicationally expensive. Our design of privacy-preserving techniques is principled on not requiring a trusted third-party while being highly efficient in terms of time and space complexities. The problem has two interesting and challenging characteristics: First, the degree of privacy protection and LBS accuracy depends on the context, such as population and road density, around a user's location. Second, an adversary may violate a user's location privacy in two ways: (i) based on the user's location information contained in the LBS query payload and (ii) by inferring a user's geographical location based on the device's IP address. To address these challenges, we introduce CAP, a context-aware privacy-preserving LBS system with integrated protection for both data privacy and communication anonymity. We have implemented CAP and integrated it with Google Maps, a popular LBS system. Theoretical analysis and experimental results validate CAP's effectiveness on privacy protection, LBS accuracy, and communication QoS (Quality-of-Service).

2003

Abstract An increasing number of systems use contextual information about their users. Such contextual information can be used to design applications that survey usage and adapt thereafter, or simply just use context information to optimize presentation. Context information could therefore be used to create applications for the benefit of the users of the system, but the same information could cause serious violations of personal integrity if misused.

Telematics and Informatics, 2006

Recent achievements in the positioning technology enable the provision of location-based services that require high accuracy. On the other hand, location privacy is important, since position information is considered as personal information. Thus, anonymity and location privacy in mobile and pervasive environments has been receiving increasing attention during the last few years, and several mechanisms and architectures have been proposed to prevent ''big brother'' phenomena. In this paper, we discuss an architecture to shield the location of a mobile user and preserve the anonymity on the service delivery. This architecture relies on un-trusted entities to distribute segments of anonymous location information, and authorizes other entities to combine these portions and derive the actual location of a user. The paper describes how the proposed architecture takes into account the location privacy requirements, and how it is used by the end usersÕ devices, e.g., mobile phones, for the dissemination of location information to Service Providers. Furthermore, it discusses performance study experiments, based on real location data, and summarizes the threats analysis results.

Handbook of Database Security, 2008

Summary. The adoption of location-based services (LBS) brings new privacy threats to users. The user location information revealed in LBS requests may be used by attackers to associate sensitive information of the user with her identity. This contribution focuses on privacy ...

Proceedings of the 2nd SIGSPATIAL ACM GIS 2009 International Workshop on Security and Privacy in GIS and LBS, 2009

When a user issues a query, database engines will usually return results based solely on the query and the content of the database. However, query issuers have a "context" which if taken into account will certainly change the outcome of the query. Thus, when responding to the query, the database system can consider the query issuer's context and return only the objects/tuples in the database that not only satisfy the query predicates but also are relevant to the query issuer's context. In this paper, we give an overview of Chameleon; a context-aware database management system. Chameleon introduces SQL-level constructs that describe the "context" in which the query is issued as well as the reciprocal contexts of the objects in the database. By tying the query issuer's contexts with the corresponding contexts of the objects in the database, Chameleon can retrieve the objects of relevance to the query context. Using Chameleon's general interfaces for context definition and awareness activation, we show how database systems that offer not only location-sensitive privacy but also other forms of privacy, e.g., both location-sensitive and timesensitive privacy profiles for their users can be realized easily. Several modeling and performance challenges for realizing context-aware database management systems are presented.