Decentralized privacy protection strategies for location-based services

Abstract

The rapid development of the integration of cloud computing and location-based services have drawn so much attention currently. With the increasing number of users who own smart phones, significant amount of data that describe user surrounding information and interests have become widely available. However, significant attentions have been raised on the privacy issues. The existing approaches mainly focus on a centralized approach which brings tremendous security concerns. To prevent a centralized query processor from being attached by malicious hackers, we propose a decentralized approach to protect the sensitive location information of users who request for location-based services. Our system provides an approximate computing and an exact computing mechanism for different scenarios and requirements.