Co-location and air pollution exposure: case studies on the usefulness of location privacy

Location privacy has long been studied, in order to protect users' location data from untrusted servers. While existing research analyzed location privacy methods with generic utility measures, the lack of application-oriented perspectives imposes challenges for adopting location privacy. This study fills the gap by putting application utility front and center, studying the impacts of location privacy in two concrete case studies. We conduct empirical evaluations with real-world datasets from two large cities, and provide in-depth analysis on the obtained results. Furthermore, we examine the relationship between generic utility and application utility as well as the trade-off between privacy and utility in specific application settings. Our results point out interesting behaviors of the studied privacy methods and can help applications with location privacy decision-making.