Abstract:

In recent years, mobile devices and smart phones with GPS and internet access have become extremely common. People obtain information easily via these devices. Although location based services (LBS) are very popular, their usage can also raise severe privacy concerns. For example, revealing users' precise positions may allow an adversary to infer sensitive information. Therefore, the mechanisms for protecting location privacy are mandatory when LBS are used. We propose a general model for privacy-aware mobile services in road networks (StarGraph network model). The protected mode guarantees k-anonymity under the strict reciprocity condition through Hilbert order-based star network expansion and cloaking star choice mechanism. Comprehensive experimental evaluation is conducted to validate the efficiency of the proposed model.

Key words: location-based services;location privacy;k-anonymity;spatial cloaking;reciprocity