Location Privacy Preservation for Mobile Users in Location-Based Services

Because location-based cyber services are increasingly found in mobile applications (e.g., social networking and maps), user location privacy preservation is essential and remains one of the several ongoing research challenges. In this paper, we propose a region-of-interest division-based algorithm to Preserve the location Privacy of mobile device users in location-based Cyber Services (PPCS). Unlike existing methods, our proposed PPCS approach generates dummy locations while considering the semantic information of those locations. The PPCS algorithm enables the generated locations to exclude or reduce the exposure of a user’s real location. In our analysis, we demonstrate that PPCS is resilient to both colluding attacks and inference attacks. We also evaluate the efficiency and demonstrate the utility of our proposed approach through extensive simulations.