Lightweight Collaborative Semantic Scheme for Generating an Obfuscated Region to Ensure Location Privacy

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects a huge number of different types of sensing devices, with capabilities ranging from very high to very low, enabling them to communicate and share many types of collected data. Among the different types of data, location information is particularly important as it is needed to create a smart environment that can greatly increase the quality of human life. However, the issue of location privacy has been intensified by the new properties introduced by the IoT. We have thus developed a scheme for protecting location privacy that can be deployed in low-capability user devices and run in a distributed IoT system without a trusted server. In this "lightweight collaborative semantic scheme," each user device stores only a portion of the map data and shares information with the other user devices to generate an obfuscated region that includes only accessible locations. Testing demonstrated that this scheme is practical for generating a location-protection region and that it has acceptable performance.