A semantic obfuscation technique for the Internet of Things

Although some people might willingly reveal their location information in order to obtain location-based services, few would be comfortable having their locations collected and profiled by the billions of things envisioned in the Internet of Things (IoT), at all time and in all situations. The diffusion of wireless communication networks and the technical advancements of location positioning techniques, power things of the IoT with the capabilities of automatically sensing, communicating, and processing the information about a person´s location, with a high degree of spatial and temporal precision. In this work, we address the location privacy issue by introducing the Semantic Obfuscation technique (S-Obfuscation). This technique, compared to classical geometric-based obfuscation techniques, relies on geographic knowledge to produce obfuscated locations that are harder to be detected as fake or obfuscated by an adversary. The obfuscation process is supported by our novel use of ontological classification of locations based on a geographical knowledge.