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2017, Foundations and Trends® in Privacy and Security
AI
This paper provides a comparative overview of methods for ensuring location privacy in the context of location-based services (LBS). With the rise of smartphones and the increasing use of GPS technologies, users' location data is collected and utilized, raising significant privacy concerns. The paper discusses various techniques that can be employed to protect users' location information from potential misuse, while also examining the implications of location data exposure. It highlights the need for a balance between utilizing LBS benefits and safeguarding user privacy, as well as outlining future directions for research in location privacy.
Department of …, 2009
Location-Based Services Handbook, 2018
Location-based services also raise the spectre of state surveillance of individual activity-either concurrent with an individual's movements (tracking), or retrospectively, through searching records of individual patterns of movement. 3 These are just some of the contexts in which privacy issues are raised. In this paper we begin by describing location-based services, their evolution and their future directions. We then outline privacy issues raised by such services. In Part III we consider how current Canadian data protection laws apply to location-based services, and indicate where such laws fall short of addressing the full range of issues raised by location-based services. Part IV of the paper explores some technological methods to address the privacy challenges raised by locationbased services. The paper concludes with a series of recommendations. I. LOCATION-BASED SERVICES Location-based services are proliferating largely due to the dramatic rise in the number of GPS-equipped mobile devices used by consumers. Such devices include smart phones, tablet computers and hand held Global Positioning Systems (GPS). Newer versions of internet browsers are also "location aware", facilitating the use of location information in tailoring the user's web experience. 4 Location-based services are premised on the sharing of a user's location information with a set of specified individuals within their circle of family, friends or associates. Services such as Google Latitude, 5 Glympse, 6 Foursquare 7 or Gowalla, 8 enable this kind of location sharing. Location-sharing can also have a non-consensual dimension. For example, it can be used by employers to track the location of their employees, 9 or handset vendors, operating system vendors, advertisers, advertising networks, and analytics companies may also have access to precise, sensitive information about where users are located".
2010
Due to the ability of cell phone providers to use cell phone towers to pinpoint users' locations, federal E911 requirements, the increasing popularity of GPS-capabilities in cellular phones, and the rise of cellular phones for Internet use, a plethora of new applications have been developed that share users' real-time location information online . This paper evaluates users' risk and benefit perceptions related to the use of these technologies and the privacy controls of existing location-sharing applications. We conducted an online survey of American Internet users (n = 587) to evaluate users' perceptions of the likelihood of several location-sharing use scenarios along with the magnitude of the benefit or harm of each scenario (e.g. being stalked or finding people in an emergency). We find that although the majority of our respondents had heard of location-sharing technologies (72.4%), they do not yet understand the potential value of these applications, and they have concerns about sharing their location information online. Most importantly, participants are extremely concerned about controlling who has access to their location. Generally, respondents feel the risks of using location-sharing technologies outweigh the benefits. Respondents felt that the most likely harms would stem from revealing the location of their home to others or being stalked. People felt the strongest benefit were being able to find people in an emergency and being able to track their children. We then analyzed existing commercial location-sharing applications' privacy controls (n = 89). We find that while location-sharing applications do not offer their users a diverse set of rules to control the disclosure of their location, they offer a modicum of privacy.
2004
Abstract Location awareness, the ability to determine geographical position, is an emerging technology with both significant benefits and important privacy implications for users of mobile devices such as cell phones and PDAs. Location is determined either internally by a device or externally by systems and networks with which the device interacts, and the resultant location information may be stored, used, and disclosed under various conditions that are described.
2006
Location-based services (LBS) rely on knowledge of a user's location to provide tailored services or information by means of a wireless device. LBS applications have wide-ranging implications for society, particularly in the context of tracking and monitoring groups of individuals such as children, invalids, and parolees. Despite a great deal of attention paid to technical and commercial aspects of LBS technologies, consideration of the legal, ethical, social and technology momentum issues involved has been wanting. This paper examines some of the more pressing issues that are expected to arise from the widespread use of LBS. The outcome of this paper is the development of an LBS privacy-security dichotomy. The dichotomy demonstrates the importance of striking a balance between the privacy of the individual and national security as a whole. It also presents a realized framework for reasoning about potentially problematic issues in LBS applications.
Proc. Interact, 2003
Context -aware computing often involves tracking peoples' location. Many studies and applications highlight the importance of keeping people's location information private. We discuss two types of locationbased services; location-tracking services that are based on other parties tracking the user's location and position-aware services that rely on the device's knowledge of its own location. We present an experimental case study that examines people's concern for location privacy and compare this to the use of location-based services. We find that even though the perceived usefulness of the two different types of services is the same, locationtracking services generate more concern for privacy than posit ion-aware services. We conclude that development emphasis should be given to position-aware services but that location-tracking services have a potential for success if users are given a simple option for turning the location-tracking off.
the Conference on the Global and Local in Mobile …, 2004
Accompanying the growing interest in emerging location based services has been an urgent but rather ambiguous concern shared among scholars, privacy advocates and the general public that enhanced safety will come at the expense of personal privacy. Precision tracking of mobile devices has raised the spectre of unwanted and pervasive surveillance from both state and commercial interests. This juxtaposition of public safety with fears over loss of privacy raises important questions about appropriate collection, use, and disclosure of personal information in the context of mobile phone services and network-enabled devices in general. This paper will report on findings from an ongoing study that is looking at initiatives to introduce location-based services for public safety in the United States, Canada, and Europe. It will address a number of aspects of these developments by drawing on official regulatory and policy sources. In particular, this paper will examine the various legal and regulatory aspects related to the conditions by which "consent" is established for collection, use, and disclosure of location information generated by mobile phones and other mobile access technologies.
2009 Tenth International Conference on Mobile Data Management: Systems, Services and Middleware, 2009
The widespread adoption of Location Based Services (LBSs) coupled with recent advances in location tracking technologies, pose serious concerns to user privacy. As a consequence, privacy preserving approaches have been proposed to protect the location information which is communicated during a request for an LBS. Most existing approaches are centralized as they rely on a trusted server to protect the real location of the user. Although the centralized approaches are commonplace, so far no attempt has been made to integrate them in a unified framework. Such an integration would provide the means for easily implementing and testing new techniques by offering ready-made vanilla system components and allow for both the experimental and analytical evaluation of the implemented techniques.
ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information
An individual’s location data is very sensitive geoinformation. While its disclosure is necessary, e.g., to provide location-based services (LBS), it also facilitates deep insights into the lives of LBS users as well as various attacks on these users. Location privacy threats can be mitigated through privacy regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which was introduced recently and harmonises data privacy laws across Europe. While the GDPR is meant to protect users’ privacy, the main problem is that it does not provide explicit guidelines for designers and developers about how to build systems that comply with it. In order to bridge this gap, we systematically analysed the legal text, carried out expert interviews, and ran a nine-week-long take-home study with four developers. We particularly focused on user-facing issues, as these have received little attention compared to technical issues. Our main contributions are a list of aspects from the legal text o...
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.
2013
The concern for location privacy in mobile applications is commonly motivated by a scenario in which a mobile device communicates personal location data, i.e. the device holder location, to a third party e.g. LBS provider, in exchange for some information service. We argue that this scenario offers a partial view of the actual risks for privacy, because in reality the information flow can be more complex. For example, more and more often location is computed by a third party, the location provider, e.g. Google Location Service. Location providers are in the position of collecting huge amounts of location data from the users of diverse applications (e.g. Facebook and Foursquare to cite a few). This raises novel privacy concerns. In this paper, we discuss two issues related to the protection from location providers. The first focuses on the compliance of emerging location services standards with European data protection norms; the latter focuses on hard privacy solutions protecting from untrusted location providers.
2013
The concern for location privacy in mobile applications is commonly motivated by a scenario in which a mobile device communicates personal location data, i.e. the device holder location, to a third party e.g. LBS provider, in exchange for some information service. We argue that this scenario offers a partial view of the actual risks for privacy, because in reality the information flow can be more complex. For example, more and more often location is computed by a third party, the location provider, e.g. Google Location Service. Location providers are in the position of collecting huge amounts of location data from the users of diverse applications (e.g. Facebook and Foursquare to cite a few). This raises novel privacy concerns. In this paper, we discuss two issues related to the protection from location providers. The first focuses on the compliance of emerging location services standards with European data protection norms; the latter focuses on hard privacy solutions protecting from untrusted location providers.
ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter, 2011
The rapid advance in handheld communication devices and the appearance of smartphones has allowed users to connect to the Internet and surf on the WWW while they are moving around the city or traveling. Location based services have been developed to deliver content that is adjusted to the current user location. Social networks have also responded to the challenge of users who can access the Internet from any place in the city, and location based social-networks like Foursquare have become very popular in a short period of time. The popularity of these applications is linked to the significant advantages they offer: users can exploit live location-based information to take dynamic decisions on issues like transportation, identification of places of interest or even on the opportunity to meet a friend or an associate in nearby locations. A side effect of sharing location-based information is that it exposes the user to substantial privacy related threats. Revealing the user's loca...
2012
Location privacy under dire threat as 'uberveillance' stalks the streets Location privacy under dire threat as 'uberveillance' stalks the streets
Location aware capabilities can supply context and location sensitive information and support enabling users to be contactable and locatable within a wider mobile environment. These location awareness attributes can also be used to monitor user activities and movement through space and time. This paper explores location aware technologies and the resulting changing privacy and security landscapes for such mobile systems. The paper argues that the real challenge of meeting privacy obligations will be how to limit the joining-up or collaboration between the different monitoring technologies. However, this joining up capability is the very nature of information systems.
2010
With the availability of GPS receivers in more and more mobile handsets, location sharing has become the next mobile killer-app. Services like Google Latitude or Yahoo's FireEagle are used by thousands of subscribers to share their current location in real-time with their family, their friends, or even publish it online, while Sense Network's CitySense application uses live movement traces from entire metropolitan areas to show users the "most popular places" in the city. Even though research in location privacy has proposed a range of solutions for safeguarding location information, it is unclear how existing proposals can be applied to such applications. In this paper, we set forth a categorization of location sharing applications, outline the various privacy challenges each category poses, and discuss the shortcomings of existing solutions.
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...
Dynamic & mobile GIS: investigating change …, 2006
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.
IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine, 2004
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