Privacy Preservation in Location-based Mobile Applications: Research Directions

Proliferation of mobile devices equipped with position sensors has made Location-based Service (LBS) increasingly popular. These mobile devices send user's actual location information to the third party location servers, which compile and, in some cases, share with other service providers. As a result, users aware of the privacy implications feel continuously tracked. Effective and, even more important, socially-accepted privacy enhancing technologies for these services have recently received a lot of attention in academia and industry. This paper presents an overview of the privacy preserving techniques currently applied by LBS applications. It classifies these techniques into a classification model consisting of three layers. Thus, a brief description of all the protocols, mechanisms and interfaces covering from the application layer to the network layer are presented, also providing a comparative analysis of current privacy-aware location solutions. To guide future research, a new perspective of the literature findings is proposed and research questions, methods and implications are discussed. Novel to related work, our classification embraces a holistic picture of approaching privacy-aware mobile LBS.