Privately querying location-based services with SybilQuery
Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Ubiquitous computing
Private location-based information retrieval through user collaboration
Computer Communications
Preserving privacy in participatory sensing systems
Computer Communications
Unraveling an old cloak: k-anonymity for location privacy
Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM workshop on Privacy in the electronic society
Achieving efficient query privacy for location based services
PETS'10 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Privacy enhancing technologies
Anonymity preserving framework for location-based information services
Proceedings of the International Conference on Management of Emergent Digital EcoSystems
Location-aware private service discovery in pervasive computing environment
Information Sciences: an International Journal
Scalable crowd-sourcing of video from mobile devices
Proceeding of the 11th annual international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services
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To benefit from a location-based service, a person must reveal her location to the service. However, knowing the person's location might allow the service to re-identify the person. Location privacy based on k-anonymity addresses this threat by cloaking the person's location such that there are at least k − 1 other people within the cloaked area and by revealing only the cloaked area to a location-based service. Previous research has explored two ways of cloaking: First, have a central server that knows everybody's location determine the cloaked area. However, this server needs to be trusted by all users and is a single point of failure. Second, have users jointly determine the cloaked area. However, this approach requires that all users trust each other, which will likely not hold in practice. We propose a distributed approach that does not have these drawbacks. Our approach assumes that there are multiple servers, each deployed by a different organization. A user's location is known to only one of the servers (e.g., to her cellphone provider), so there is no single entity that knows everybody's location. With the help of cryptography, the servers and a user jointly determine whether the k-anonymity property holds for the user's area, without the servers learning any additional information, not even whether the property holds. A user learns whether the k-anonymity property is satisfied and no other information. The evaluation of our sample implementation shows that our distributed k-anonymity protocol is sufficiently fast to be practical. Moreover, our protocol integrates well with existing infrastructures for location-based services, as opposed to the previous research.