A Combined Clustering Scheme for Protecting Location Privacy and Query Privacy in Pervasive Environments

Privacy protection in pervasive environments has attracted great interests in recent years. Two kinds of privacy issues, location privacy and query privacy, are threatening the security of the users. In this paper, a novel combined clustering algorithm for protecting location privacy and query privacy, namely ECC, is proposed. ECC applies a iterative K-means clustering method to group the user requests into clusters for providing location safety while utilizing a hierarchical clustering method for preserving the query privacy. ECC provides the mobile users with their desired anonymity levels and spatial tolerances. Experimental results manifest that the ECC algorithm shows merits in shorter cloaking time and is able to preserve location privacy and query privacy in continuous location based services.