Privacy preserving path recommendation for moving user on location based service

Abstract

With the increasing adoption of location based services, privacy is becoming a major concern. To hide the identity and location of a request on location based service, most methods consider a set of users in a reasonable region so as to confuse their requests. When there are not enough users, the cloaking region needs expanding to a larger area or the response needs delay. Either way degrades the quality-of-service. In this paper, we tackle the privacy problem in a predication way by recommending a privacy-preserving path for a requester. We consider the popular navigation application, where users may continuously query different location based servers during their movements. Based on a set of metrics on privacy, distance and the quality of services that a LBS requester often desires, a secure path is computed for each request according to user's preference, and can be dynamically adjusted when the situation is changed. A set of experiments are performed to verify our method and the relationship between parameters are discussed in details. We also discuss how to apply our method into practical applications. © 2013 IEEE.