Protecting location privacy against inference attacks

  • Authors:
  • Kazuhiro Minami;Nikita Borisov

  • Affiliations:
  • National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan;University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

GPS-enabled mobile devices are a quickly growing market and users are starting to share their location information with each other through services such as Google Latitude. Location information, however, is very privacy-sensitive since it can be used to infer activities, preferences, relationships, and other personal information, and thus access to it must be carefully protected. We provide a formal definition of location privacy that incorporates an adversary's ability to predict location and discuss possible implementation of access control mechanisms that satisfy this definition. To support our reasoning, we analyze a preliminary data set to evaluate the accuracy of location prediction.