Intelligent pseudo‐location recommendation for protecting personal location privacy

Abstract

Summary Individuals' right to privacy includes control over access to their location information. With the advent of location‐based services and personal transport services (such as ridesharing), the risk of location privacy breaches is increased greatly. The potential negative effects of location privacy leakages include spam location‐based service flooding, threats to personal safety (such as physical attacks), and intrusion related to access to private places (such as homes and hospitals). Therefore, protecting the privacy of users' real locations is becoming increasingly important. This is often achieved using a pseudo‐location near the real location, but existing pseudo‐location generators, such as NRand and the uniform random method, suffer from statistical inference, which can infer the obfuscation domain to cover the real location. In this paper, we propose an intelligent pseudo‐location recommendation (IPLR) method to reduce the risk of a statistical inference attack. In IPLR, we generate a random substitute of the real location to attract the adversary and thus hide the real location. Then, the pseudo‐location is generated in the neighborhood of the random substitute location following a normal distribution; the random substitute location is changed frequently to confuse attackers. In particular, we define three levels of location privacy, ie, address level, street level, and district level, to evaluate the effectiveness of the IPLR method. Our experimental study using simulation data demonstrates that the proposed IPLR method achieves lower risk of location privacy leakage and higher probabilities of safety in all three levels of location privacy than NRand and the random method. It also demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed IPLR to balance location privacy and service quality.

Location‐based social network recommendations with computational intelligence‐based similarity computation and user check‐in behavior

“…An adaptive POI‐based algorithm was proposed using geographical and user activity influence which used two different strategies based on user activity online and incorporated those strategies with the popularity of location feature 27 . To reduce the risk of a statistical inference attack an intelligent pseudo‐location recommendation framework 28 has been introduced in location recommendation system. The temporal influence also makes a significant impact on the recommendations though most of the algorithms do not consider it for recommendation.…”