K-Anonymous Cloaking Algorithm Based on Weighted Adjacency Graph for Preserving Location Privacy

The propagation of position identifying devices, such as GPS (Global Positioning System), becomes increasingly a privacy threat in location-based services (LBSs). However, in order to enjoy such services, the user must precisely disclose his/her exact location to the LBS. So, it is a key challenge to efficiently preserve user´s privacy while accessing LBS. For this, the existing method employs a 2PASS cloaking framework that not only hides the actual user location but also reduces bandwidth consumption. However, it suffers from privacy attack. Therefore, we aim to provide the solutions which can preserve user privacy by utilizing k-anonymity mechanism. In this paper, we propose a weighted adjacency graph based k-anonymous cloaking technique that can provide protection to user and also reduce bandwidth usages. Our cloaking approach efficiently supports k-nearest neighbor queries without revealing private information of the query initiator. We demonstrate via experimental results that our algorithm yields much better performance than the existing one.