Location Privacy Protection Through Obfuscation-Based Techniques

The widespread adoption of mobile communication devices combined with technical improvements of location technologies are fostering the development of a new wave of applications that manage physical positions of individuals to offer location-based services for business, social or informational purposes. As an effect of such innovative services, however, privacy concerns are increasing, calling for more sophisticated solutions for providing users with different and manageable levels of privacy. In this work, we propose a way to express users privacy preferences on location information in a straightforward and intuitive way. Then, based on such location privacy preferences, we discuss a new solution, based on obfuscation techniques, which permits us to achieve, and quantitatively estimate through a metric, different degrees of location privacy.