Privacy-protected communication for location-based services

Location-Based Services are emerging fast and the problems with privacy are growing with them. While a platform for Location-Based Services can provide the user with high-quality Location-Based Service browsing and powerful mechanisms to reduce the amount of location data transmitted such a platform is dangerous as it has to manage the location data of the users and the actual service usage. This aggregation of private data is a risk in itself. With this paper we want to show that it is possible to implement most Location-Based Services without such a platform and propose a mechanism enabling finegrained control of privacy for a Location-Based Service user. We make use of strong cryptographic techniques to enable a real trust relation between individuals and a weaker trust relation between an individual and a company. Copyright c © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.