Batching Location Cloaking Techniques for Location Privacy and Safety Protection

Abstract

Location-based services (LBSs) have become a profitable market because they offer real-time and local information to their users. Although several benefits are obtained from the usage of LBSs, they have opened up many privacy and safety challenges because a user needs to release his/her location. To tackle these challenges, many location-cloaking techniques have been proposed. Even though these solutions are effective in protecting either location privacy or location safety, they do not provide unified protection. Furthermore, most of them do not address the potential bottleneck in the anonymity server as a high demand of location and safety protection is requested. Finally, they do not take into account the potential impact of processing a large amount of location-cloaked queries. This paper deals with the efficient construction of location-cloaking areas for many users, who have both privacy and safety requirements. To achieve this goal, the construction of location-cloaking areas is carried out in batches. The LBSs’ batch processing takes advantage of users who are close to each other and who have similar requirements. Two batching techniques to build cloaking regions are analyzed using simulations. Empirical results show our techniques are able to balance the anonymizer workload, quality of location privacy and safety protection, and LBS workload.