Overview of Location Privacy Protection

The explosive growth of wireless communications and mobile database techniques results in the sufficient growth of location-detection devices.We can easily obtain the locations of the mobile objects through positioning techniques which result in the sufficient development of location-based services (LBSs).Location-based services provide corresponding services to users based on the locations of the mobile users,and provide conveniences for mobile users.In location-based services system,mobile users provide their location information to the central server when they issue location-based services,and then the central server will process the query requirements.However,the system can not guarantee that the location-based server is trusted; it will disclose or misuse the location information of the users,so mobile users may suffer from some invade which could not presuppose.To protect mobile users' location privacy,the exact location information of mobile users should not be sent to the location-based server.However,the quality of the service is determined by the precision of location information of the service issuers.Hence a trade-off between location privacy and quality of services emerges.Some solutions have been proposed to deal with location privacy problem in location-based service.In this paper,we give an overview of the methods dealing with the location privacy problem and some problems that have not been resolved.