A formal model of obfuscation and negotiation for location privacy

Abstract

Obfuscation concerns the practice of deliberately degradingthe quality of information in some way, so as to protect the privacy ofthe individual to whom that information refers. In this paper, we arguethat obfuscation is an important technique for protecting an individual’slocation privacy within a pervasive computing environment. The papersets out a formal framework within which obfuscated location-based servicesare defined. This framework provides a computationally efficientmechanism for balancing an individual’s need for high-quality informationservices against that individual’s need for location privacy. Negotiationis used to ensure that a location-based service provider receivesonly the information it needs to know in order to provide a service ofsatisfactory quality. The results of this work have implications for numerousapplications of mobile and location-aware systems, as they providea new theoretical foundation for addressing the privacy concerns thatare acknowledged to be retarding the widespread acceptance and use oflocation-based services.