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

Authors: Ali Khoshgozaran, Cyrus Shahabi

Addresses: Information Laboratory (InfoLab), Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA. ' Information Laboratory (InfoLab), Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: location privacy; location-based services; LBS; spatial databases; spatial query processing; taxonomy; privacy protection; information sharing; sensitive information; sensitive location information.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2010.036819

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2010 Vol.5 No.2, pp.86 - 96

Published online: 10 Nov 2010 *

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