Preserving User Location Privacy in Era of Location-Based Services: Challenges, Techniques and Framework

The technological advancements of mobile networks, devices, global position technology and sensors, have lead to a plethora of location-based services (LBSs) which is being offered to user. In the modern digital age, most of the automobiles use location sensing technologies and the mobile devices are equipped with GPS location tracking. In spite of the numerous potential benefits of location-based services, location awareness poses some foreseeable threats, the most important of which is location privacy. A single piece of information about location can reveal a lot about user, such as ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘where’ someone is. This paper presents a comprehensive review of various aspects related to location privacy. An attempt has been made to introduce a framework to balance the trade-offs between privacy and security. The proposed framework uses privacy mechanism to protect individual’s sensitive data, and a role-based access control technique to provide security of collected data through authorized user.