A Flexible Approach for Hiding User Location
Man Lung Yiu
Department of Computer Science
Aalborg University
Thursday, June 1, 12:30
Fredrik Bajers Vej 7, E3-109
Recently, location-based service users are increasingly aware of their privacy — they hope to enjoy location-based services without disclosing their exact locations.
Existing location privacy protection methods can be broadly classified into: (i) spatial cloaking techniques, and (ii) cryptographic matching solutions. The former requires complex server implementations and transmits huge number of unnecessary objects over communication network. On the other hand, the latter does not offer guarantee on the accuracy of results.
To overcome all the above problems, we propose a novel approach, called SpaceTwist, for hiding user location. Its main advantages are: a high degree of privacy can be achieved, the user has flexibility to control the search process dynamically, and the server implementation is simple.
In addition, we develop a granular searching technique to reduce the communication cost while guaranteeing the accuracy bound of the returned results. Experimental results on real datasets show that our technique retrieves results with good accuracy at low communication cost.
