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.