A Vagueness-based Obfuscation Technique for Protecting Location Privacy

Technical evolution of location technologies has augmented the development and growth of location-based services. With widespread adoption of these services, threats to location privacy are increasing, entailing more robust and sophisticated solutions. This paper proposes an intuitive obfuscation-based scheme, which uses vagueness in human perception of nearness to provide a flexible and robust location privacy scheme. Key to this work is the concept of vagueness degree, which aims to enhance its robustness against privacy attacks. Furthermore, our scheme is totally in line with human perception of privacy and provides a solution, which mostly suits proximity-based services, social networking environments, and other similar applications. The solution is also applicable to various environments ranging from geographical locations to IP-based and mobile Networks. We propose three privacy-aware architectures for our scheme. In addition, it is shown that the time and space complexity of the scheme is polynomial. The robustness of the scheme against privacy attacks as well as its implementation issues are discussed.