Location Privacy-An Overview

Location-based services (LBS) are mobile services which evaluate knowledge about a user´s location. In most cases this is done to provide the user with personalized information, e.g. to list point of interests in his nearer surrounding. But users have concerns when their whereabouts are tracked and their location information is disclosedto external service providers. So it is no wonder that a lot of publications deal with the specific privacy issues of LBS usage. The aim of this article is to give an overview about the most relevant works in this field: we first discuss different attack scenarios where location information is misused. Afterwards we present a classification of technical approaches to prevent such misuse of location information. We also summarize some results from pertinent empirical studies.