Simulation of obfuscation and negotiation for location privacy

Abstract

Current mobile computing systems can automatically sense and communicate detailed data about a person's location. Location privacy is an urgent research issue because concerns about privacy are seen to be inhibiting the growth of mobile computing. This paper investigates a new technique for safeguarding location privacy, called obfuscation, which protects a person's location privacy by degrading the quality of information about that person's location. Obfuscation is based on spatial imperfection and offers an orthogonal approach to conventional techniques for safeguarding information about a person's location. Imprecision and inaccuracy are two types of imperfection that may be used to achie..