Protecting user privacy in location-based services over road networks

ABSTRACT In location-based services (LBS), the users with mobile devices share information such as their locations and queries to obtain desired services. Additionally, LBS providers are often able to track or record the movements of their users with great spatial and temporal accuracy. However, user location information can be misused by LBS providers or attackers, which creates privacy problems for users. This raises concerns about privacy breaches; therefore, many approaches have been proposed to protect user privacy. Thus, in previous works, the authors have proposed approaches to maintain the privacy of mobile users in the Euclidean space. However, it is difficult to apply current methods of Euclidean space to the environment of the road networks due to the topological characteristics of the road networks. In this paper, we propose a new approach to preserve user privacy in LBS over road networks. Additionally, in this paper, we provide new methods for selecting segments and users on the road network to face the attacks. Moreover, to evaluate our work, we compared it with other works such as MCC, BATCH, V-DCA, D-TC, and GCA approaches. After comparing these works, our work offers a good balance between quality of service and privacy.