A grid-based location privacy-preserving method for LBS users

With the availability and rapid development of GPS-enabled mobile devices and the positioning technology, the Location-Based Services (LBS), aiming at providing customized services according to users' spatio-temporal location information, become increasingly popular in many domains. Users are more and more concerned about privacy issues such as the disclosure of their location in one hand. In the other hand they take advantage of the conveniences of LBS in different aspects of their daily lives. Many researches have been conducted in the location cloaking of location privacy, however, the long cloaking time and large cloaked spatial area affected the quality of service. To solve this problem, we propose a grid-based location cloaking method based on k-anonymity model, which is expected to produce better quality of service by reducing the cloaking time and cloaked spatial region.