Applying privacy on the dissemination of location information

Recent achievements in the positioning technology enable the provision of location-based services that require high accuracy. On the other hand, location privacy is important, since position information is considered as personal information. Thus, anonymity and location privacy in mobile and pervasive environments has been receiving increasing attention during the last few years, and several mechanisms and architectures have been proposed to prevent “big brother” phenomena. In this paper, we discuss an architecture to shield the location of a mobile user and preserve the anonymity on the service delivery. This architecture relies on un-trusted entities to distribute segments of anonymous location information, and authorizes other entities to combine these portions and derive the actual location of a user. The paper describes how the proposed architecture takes into account the location privacy requirements, and how it is used by the end users’ devices, e.g., mobile phones, for the dissemination of location information to Service Providers. Furthermore, it discusses performance study experiments, based on real location data, and summarizes the threats analysis results.