Towards TTP-free lightweight solution for location privacy using location-based anonymity prediction
Sheikh Iqbal Ahamed, Chowdhury Sharif Hasan, Md. Munirul Haque, Md. Osman Gani · 2011
Location-based services are becoming increasingly popular with the proliferation of location aware devices. It is not possible to access location-based services and preserve privacy at the same time when the user provides exact location information. Cloaking or obfuscating location data is the only way to protect location-privacy. To do that, most of the systems use third party location anonymizer. In this paper, we propose a novel location privacy obfuscation framework without any trusted third party (TTP). Most of the existing solutions attempt to satisfy k-anonymity. In this paper we present the problems of using fixed and user defined k. In order to solve the problems our proposed solution aims to meet probabilistic k-anonymity. Based on historic data expected number of users present in a place is predicted which is used as probabilistic anonymity level. Thus we eliminate the use of any TTP which results into improvement of query-processing time and provides fewer query results for the user to process minimizing the overall response time. Users' exact location information is not revealed in either communication or computation process.