On the Trade-Off Between Privacy and Information Quality in Location Based Services

Abstract

Location based services (LBS) are leveraged in everyday services and applications, as they can provide contextual and relevant information for the user needs. These services require the location of the user to be sent along with other relevant information, to provide the data in return that is relevant to the sent position. Although this opens up exciting scenarios for users, it has also been studied since it encompasses several potential privacy issues, which range from the re-identification of the user to the discovery of habits and routines. In this work, we present a study on the tradeoff between the information quality obtained from an LBS and the location precision sent by the user. Our results indicate that by sending out queries with imprecise location enhances the privacy of the users, while still providing a satisfactory quality of information.