POLA: A privacy-preserving protocol for location-based real-time advertising

The increasing popularity of smartphones, equipped with GPS, provides new opportunities for location-based service (LBS). Among all kinds of LBSs, targeted advertising based on users' locations takes great advantage of the rich location data to improve the accuracy of advertising and thus potentially increase the sellers' profits. However, location-based advertising (LBA) has raised significant privacy concerns, since the location information used in such kinds of services is private information, which the users may not be willing to expose. In this paper, we present POLA, which is a Privacy-preserving prOtocol for Location-based real-time Advertising. In this protocol, we not only preserve the privacy of the location data, we also take the values of advertisers into consideration which is also regarded as private information. We show the privacy-preserving properties of POLA in details. Furthermore, we have conducted simulations to evaluate the performance of POLA. Evaluation results show that POLA achieves privacy preserving LBA with relatively low overhead.