A taxonomy of approaches to preserve location privacy in location-based services

The ubiquity of smartphones and other location-aware hand-held devices has resulted in a dramatic increase in popularity of location-based services (LBS) tailored to users’ locations. The comfort of LBS comes with a privacy cost. Various distressing privacy violations caused by sharing sensitive location information with potentially malicious services have highlighted the importance of location privacy research aiming to protect users’ privacy while interacting with LBS. This paper presents a taxonomy of different approaches proposed to enable location privacy in LBS and elaborates on the strengths and weaknesses of each class of approaches.