Preserving Privacy While Accessing Location Based Services

These days life has become completely mobile. Today neither a person does have to sit in front of his home computer to search for nearby restaurants in Google, nor does he or she have to do the same for knowing the transport schedule before leaving for work. With the advent of mobile phones and Online-Social-Networks it has become very easy to communicate with friends, find shopping destinations or let people know about which places someone visits while travelling. The mobile phones or more precisely the location based services running on them, track the current location of users to provide a set of services. But the user does not know where or by whom his or her location is accessed and for what purposes. An adversary can very easily access the user’s location and perform some harmful activity or the location information can be used by the service provider itself to gain financial benefit without the user being aware of that. In this paper some techniques to provide location privacy are discussed in general. We will discuss how a system can be designed efficiently to protect location data with different views. We will describe three different applications of Location Sharing, identify their privacy requirements and provide a model system for each of them which are built to alleviate these privacy concerns.