Abstract:

With the rapid development of location technology and wireless mobile devices in recent years, users can get their location information at any time. However, location information can be disclosed, or even lead to disclosure of personal privacy. We introduce a  proactive collaboration location privacy-preserving method, named P2PSpaceTwist, which uses a kind of active consultation mechanism with freshness. Users employ this mechanism to obtain the locations of their neighbors and broadcast their own location as well. When the user’s anonymity demand is met, the user randomly selects an agent from the anonymous group and regards the random position in the anonymous region formed by the anonymous group as his real location. Then the agent queries results incrementally from location-based service and broadcasts the results to his neighbours. Experimental results show that the P2PSpaceTwist can quickly fulfill anonymous queries and achieve accurate results. Compared with other methods, the P2PSpaceTwist’s communication overhead is lower.

Key words: location privacy, location-based-service, incremental nearest neighbor query, collaboration