Privacy Preservation in Location-Based Mobile Applications: Research Directions

Proliferation of mobile devices equipped with position sensors has made Location-based Service (LBS) increasingly popular. These mobile devices send user´s actual location information to the third party location servers, which compile and, in some cases, share with other service providers. As a result, users aware of the privacy implications feel continuously tracked. Effective and, even more important, socially-accepted privacy enhancing technologies for these services have recently received a lot of attention in academia and industry. This paper presents an overview of the privacy preserving techniques currently applied by LBS applications. It classifies these techniques into a classification model consisting of three layers. Thus, a brief description of all the protocols, mechanisms and interfaces covering from the application layer to the network layer are presented, also providing a comparative analysis of current privacy-aware location solutions. To guide future research, a new perspective of the literature findings is proposed and research questions, methods and implications are discussed. Novel to related work, our classification embraces a holistic picture of approaching privacy-aware mobile LBS.