LocationSafe: Granular Location Privacy for IoT Devices

TL;DR

LocationSafe introduces a privacy module integrated into GPSD daemon, enabling granular control over GPS data sharing on IoT devices with minimal performance impact.

Contribution

First design and implementation of a privacy module within GPSD daemon for granular location control on IoT devices.

Findings

Privacy module provides strong privacy guarantees

Minimal performance overhead observed

Enables granular control over GPS data sharing

Abstract

Today, mobile data owners lack consent and control over the release and utilization of their location data. Third party applications continuously process and access location data without data owners granular control and without knowledge of how location data is being used. The proliferation of IoT devices will lead to larger scale abuses of trust. In this paper we present the first design and implementation of a privacy module built into the GPSD daemon. The GPSD daemon is a low-level GPS interface that runs on GPS enabled devices. The integration of the privacy module ensures that data owners have granular control over the release of their GPS location. We describe the design of our privacy module and then evaluate the performance of private GPS release and demonstrate that strong privacy guarantees can be built into the GPSD daemon itself with minimal to no overhead.