A Survey of System Architectures, Privacy Preservation, and Main Research Challenges on Location-Based Services

Abstract

Location-based services (LBSs) have become popular in recent years due to the ever-increasing usage of smart mobile devices and mobile applications through networks. Although LBS application provides great benefits to mobile users, it also raises a sever privacy concern of users due to the untrusted service providers. In the lack of privacy enhancing mechanisms, most applications of the LBS may discourage the user's acceptance of location services in general, and endanger the user's privacy in particular. Therefore, it is a great interest to discuss on the recent privacy-preserving mechanisms in LBSs. Many existing location-privacy protection-mechanisms (LPPMs) make great efforts to increase the attacker's uncertainty on the user's actual whereabouts by generating a multiple of fake-locations together with user's actual positions. In this survey, we present a study and analysis of existing LPPMs and the state-of-art privacy measures in service quality aware LBS applications. We first study the general architecture of privacy qualification system for LBSs by surveying the existing framework and outlining its main feature components. We then give an overview of the basic privacy requirements to be considered in the design and evaluation of LPPMs. Furthermore, we discuss the classification and countermeasure solutions of existing LPPMs for mitigating the current LBS privacy protection challenges. These classifications include anonymization, obfuscation, and an encryption-based technique, as well as the combination of them is called a hybrid mechanism. Finally, we discuss several open issues and research challenges based on the latest progresses for on-going LBS and location privacy research. IntroductionRecent advances in mobile computing makes location based service (LBS) increasingly popular, which attract millions of individuals. LBS refers to a location information and convenient services provided to mobile users based on the geographic position and other information of users' mobile devices to obtain their real location data [1]- [2]. In this context, user oriented LBS applications are developed to obtain location related information relevant to their current position and surroundings. Common examples include direct location sharing with friends (e.g., uploading real-time location data and tagging services) and sharing with business sectors (e.g., search for near-by services, location check-in and search near-by friends), which help the user to share and determine their current position with friends in the communication networks [3]- [4]. Other typical examples of LBS applications include map applications (e.g., Google Maps), point of interest retrieval (e.g., Around-Me), coupons or discount offers (e.g., Group-on), GPS navigation (e.g., Tom-tom) and location-aware social networks (e.g., Face-book, Weibo, Foursquare, Wechat) [5]. A more large-scale LBS application could ask users around a region or even country to disclose their exact locations for security and safety purpose (e.g., in military, medical care, e...

A Novel Location Privacy-Preserving Approach Based on Blockchain

“…Typical applications include map applications (such as Google Maps), interest point query (such as Meituan), location-aware services (such as Foursquare), etc. [7]. Users need to share their location data when using these applications.…”