A Context-aware Privacy-preserving Solution for Location-based Services

Although there are many approaches and methods to protect user privacy, most of them work best for normal cases. In several particular situations, they would lead to privacy leak. Our approach is to overcome these exceptional scenarios by being aware of user context. In this paper, we propose a context-aware privacy-preserving solution for location-based services. With our system architecture as the backbone, we present our privacy-protecting strategy to deal with privacy breach by using cache and hybrid obfuscation. Furthermore, we analyze the contexts of privacy leak, even with privacy-preserving techniques, and show that our solution can get over them by providing either full or probabilistic privacy protection. The former gives no privacy risk to the end-user while the latter completely preserves the attack probability at least 1/k for all cases.