Protecting Whereabouts and Whatabouts for Check-In Based Location-Based Services

Abstract

Using diverse location-based services (LBSs), especially through mobile smart phones, have become a daily routine for many people. Location privacy is an important concern with each and every LBS request. Besides whereabouts, location disclosure provides attackers with whatabouts as well. Since each individual's location privacy needs are not the same, most solutions enable individualized location privacy profiles. In this work, as attack models and trustfulness of LBS providers are different, in the context of location check-ins, we provide a framework offering a palette of location privacy protection methods to be picked for each LBS provider/attacker. Depending on what to protect per LBS provider, i.e., whereabouts and/or whatabouts, and attack model, i.e., weak or strong, we develop six privacy protection methods. A top-down location cloaking algorithm which is able to enforce the six protection methods is presented. An extensive experimental evaluation on two real datasets are performed.