Simulation of obfuscation and negotiation for location privacy

Abstract

Current mobile computing systems can automatically sense and communicatedetailed data about a person’s location. Location privacy is an urgent researchissue because concerns about privacy are seen to be inhibiting the growthof mobile computing. This paper investigates a new technique for safeguardinglocation privacy, called obfuscation, which protects a person’s location privacy bydegrading the quality of information about that person’s location. Obfuscation isbased on spatial imperfection and offers an orthogonal approach to conventionaltechniques for safeguarding information about a person’s location. Imprecisionand inaccuracy are two types of imperfection that may be used to achieve obfuscation.A set of simulations are used to empirically evaluate different obfuscationstrategies based on imprecision and inaccuracy. The results show that obfuscationcan enable high quality of service in concert with high levels of privacy.