A Privacy Risk Assessment Methodology for Location-Based Systems

Mobiquitous systems are gaining more and more weight in our daily lives. They are becoming a reality from our home and work to our leisure. The use of Location-Based Services (LBS) in these systems is increasingly demanded by users. Yet, while on one hand they enable people to be more “connected”, on the other hand, they may expose people to serious privacy issues. The design and deployment of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) for LBS has been widely addressed in the last years. However, strikingly, there is still a lack of methodologies to assess the risk that using LBS may have on users’ privacy (even when PETs are considered). This paper presents a privacy risk assessment methodology to (i) identify (ii) analyse, and (iii) evaluate the potential privacy issues affecting mobiquitous systems. The feasibility of each step of our methodology is illustrated through an innovative case study of dynamic carpooling.