Search Me If You Can: Privacy-preserving Location Query Service

TL;DR

This paper introduces a suite of privacy-preserving location query protocols that enable different levels of location privacy for users while maintaining efficiency suitable for mobile platforms.

Contribution

It proposes a novel suite of fine-grained privacy-preserving location query protocols that support encrypted location queries with varying privacy levels.

Findings

Protocols support multiple privacy levels for location queries

The approach is efficient enough for mobile device implementation

Enhances privacy without significantly sacrificing utility

Abstract

Location-Based Service (LBS) becomes increasingly popular with the dramatic growth of smartphones and social network services (SNS), and its context-rich functionalities attract considerable users. Many LBS providers use users' location information to offer them convenience and useful functions. However, the LBS could greatly breach personal privacy because location itself contains much information. Hence, preserving location privacy while achieving utility from it is still an challenging question now. This paper tackles this non-trivial challenge by designing a suite of novel fine-grained Privacy-preserving Location Query Protocol (PLQP). Our protocol allows different levels of location query on encrypted location information for different users, and it is efficient enough to be applied in mobile platforms.