A Query-Aware Location Privacy Protection Approach in LBS for Road Networks

Mobile users often request services from Location Based Service (LBS) provider when traveling along roads. In order to acquire better service, they have to provide their exact location information, which may result in leaking their location privacy. Current location privacy preservation methods for road networks usually based on star expansion model, which may make anonymity segment set overlapped each other. To address this issue, a query-aware location anonymity approach is proposed, and highlighted itself in three aspects: (1) the model meets the location K-anonymity and road segment l-anonymity, and the reciprocal anonymity segment set is shared among all mobile users located in the segment set. (2) The anonymity segment set is compacted which can improve the query efficiency in LBS. (3) Different optimization levels can be provided considering the tradeoff between privacy preservation and query processing performance. At last, the experiment results verify the effectiveness and security of the anonymity segment sets.