A Novel Approach for Protecting Location Privacy Using Obfuscation Operators

In recent years, location-based services have become very popular, because of the availability of modern mobile devices with integrated position sensors. Prominent examples are points of interest finders or geo-social networks such as Facebook, Qype and Loopt. However, providing such services with private user positions may raise serious privacy concerns if these positions are not protected adequately. Therefore, location privacy concepts become mandatory to ensure the user's acceptance of location-based services. The concept of location privacy can be defined as the right of individuals to decide how, when and for which purposes their location information can be released to other parties. The physical location of users is rapidly becoming easily available as a class of personal information that can be processed for providing new online and mobile services, generally called Location-Based Services (LBSs). Customer oriented applications, social networks and monitoring services can be greatly enriched with data reporting where people are, how they are moving, or whether they are close to specific locations. In such a context, privacy concerns are increasing and call for sophisticated solutions able to guarantee different levels of location privacy to the users. In this project, we address this problem and present a solution based on different obfuscation operators that, when used individually or in combination, protect the privacy of the location information of users.