Secure Cloaking Area Based on User Profile Similarity

Abstract—Location-based services (LBS) are the applications of mobile technology, GIS and Internet that utilize the location of the user in order to provide the service. However, access to a person’s location might allow the service provider to breach the privacy of the person. Location privacy based on k-anonymity addresses this threat by cloaking the person’s location such that there are at least k – 1 other people within the cloaked area. Then instead of the exact location, cloaking area will be revealed to service provider. In this paper it has been shown that only k anonymity is not sufficient to protect location privacy. Problem of location privacy preservation is addressed via technique of anonymizing similar users together. The proposed work aims at generating a cloaking area which is containing users of similar profile. The cloaking area generated as a result is more secure. Further, for the validity of this claim statistical techniques have been applied and it has been proved that cloaking area having more similar users is safer. Experimental evaluations have been performed to calculate the area of cloaking region and time required to generate it. It has been found that for enhanced privacy levels our system puts up a little overhead.