Towards Achieving Personalized Privacy for Location-Based Services

With the growth of wireless and mobile technologies, we are witnessing an increase in location-based services (LBSs). Although LBSs provide enhanced functionalities, they open up new vulnerabilities that can be exploited to cause security and privacy breaches. Consequently, location data of individuals used by such services must be adequately protected. Such services will require new models for expressing privacy preferences for location data and mechanisms for enforcing them. We identify the factors on which location privacy depends and propose models for expressing privacy that can be used by LBSs. We discuss the architecture of a system that allows one to specify and enforce location privacy and that can be easily integrated with existing systems providing LBSs. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by developing a prototype.