Privacy of Location Obfuscation

There are many results on the possibilities of privacy leak in location-based services, and many remedies have also been suggested. In this paper, we look at this problem from an altogether different perspective claiming that privacy leaks are most likely inevitable for a lot of remedial mechanisms, and therefore it is necessary to provide means to a user to detect such leaks in advance. We specifically target the mechanisms using location obfuscation (aka. blurring) for providing location privacy for continuous queries. We give a definition to measure leak of location privacy. We also give a framework to compute it for a wide range of location obfuscation strategies. We then evaluate a few common strategies both analytically and experimentally and use the results to propose provably efficient algorithms for them.