Full Location Privacy Protection Through Restricted Space Cloaking
Guolei Yang, Ying Cai · Journal of Information Processing · 2017
Anonymous location data may be correlated with restricted spaces like home and office for subject identification. This creates significant privacy risks to users when they disclose their location to applications like location-based services. In this paper, we address this problem with a novel approach named restricted space cloaking. This scheme cloaks a user's location only when the location is inside a restricted space. When in non-restricted spaces, the location is reported as is. We show that this cloaking strategy is capable of full location privacy protection: given a restricted space, the adversary does not know when its owner was there; given a non-restricted location, the adversary does not know who has ever visited there. Such protection is not available from the existing cloaking techniques. In addition to full location privacy protection, the proposed strategy makes it possible for users to cloak their locations without disclosing accurate locations to either a trusted anonymizer or other users. We discuss the implementation challenges and present corresponding solutions. The performance of the proposed solutions is evaluated through simulation.