A New Framework to Protect Privacy of Location from Malicious Applications

Location-based applications have become very popular in recent years, especially during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has intensified the trend towards applications for electronic purchases and delivery services, to provide customers the facility of buying from anywhere and anytime, with great ease. However, there are some issues with these kind of purchases and delivery services. In particular, the data collected by these applications has the potential of having their security and privacy breached. Thus, trust of the service provider cannot be taken for granted. In fact, the service provider may prove to be a source of real danger to the privacy of users, especially if the service provider itself is a malicious party. Thus, it is difficult for the user to determine which applications can be trusted, and who to share their home or business location with. To solve this problem, in this research, we propose a new central platform that enables users to gather all of their (main) locations and control access to these locations in one place. Then the user can share them with other applications, such as link with hash-code included in a quick response (QR) barcode without the need to save their data in any application database. Moreover, the QR-code will be deactivated once it is used by the service provider, after the order is delivered. Therefore, the service provider will not be able to exploit the data stored in it, which means greater protection for the user's privacy. The system will offer other features for the user and the service provider as well. We have also implemented this system in a real manner to confirm its ability to improve the level of service in electronic purchase applications, in addition to improving the level of privacy of users' data.