Privacy of location obfuscation

Abstract

There are many results on the possibilities of privacy leak in location-based services, and many remedies have also been suggested. In this paper, we look at this problem from an altogether different perspective - claiming that privacy leaks are most likely inevitable for a lot of remedial mechanisms, and therefore it is necessary to provide means to a user to detect such leaks in advance. We specifically target the mechanisms using location obfuscation (aka. blurring) for providing location privacy for continuous queries. We give a definition to measure leak of location privacy.We also give a framework to compute it for a wide range of location obfuscation strategies. We then evaluate a few common strategies both analytically and experimentally and use the results to propose provably efficient algorithms for them.