Privacy-area Aware All-dummy-based Location Privacy Algorithms for Location-based Services

Location-Based Services (LBSs) have become one of the most popular activities in our daily life. With the rapid advance of LBSs, there are more threats to users’ privacy. For this reason, while enjoying the convenience provided by LBSs, we have to protect our location privacy. In this paper, we propose two all-dummy-based location privacy algorithms to achieve k-anonymity for privacy-area aware users in LBSs. Different from previous work, on the client side, our method can prevent the center attack and border attack through transforming the actual location to an anchor and the request we send to the LBSs doesn’t contain the actual location of the user. On the server side, we use a rough query before precise query to reduce the processing time and transmission bandwidth. It only returns the results that the client needs. Evaluation results show that our methods can provide more effective privacy protection and lower computation and communication cost.