Location Sharing with Trusted Peers -- Measuring Sensitivity of Location Observations

In the field of computational location privacy there are two active privacy enhancing methods typically available: anonymity and obfuscation (location cloaking). In a communication context with known and (semi-)trusted peers, anonymity is usually not a viable option, hence, leaving location cloaking as a user-centric option to improve an individual´s location privacy. In this paper, we discuss the effectiveness and limitations of location cloaking in a location sharing context with partially trusted peers by introducing a location sensitivity metric. We argue that location sensitivity reflects the user´s potential privacy-loss by estimating the potential information gain of an observer for a single observation or an observation context. As a result, location cloaking is not always a suitable option and may overestimate the user´s location privacy in a communication with a diverse partially trusted observer set.