A uniformity-based approach to location privacy

As location-based services emerge, many people feel exposed to high privacy threats. Privacy protection is a major challenge for such services and related applications. A simple approach is perturbation, which adds an artificial noise to positions and returns an obfuscated measurement to the requester. Our main finding is that, unless the noise is chosen properly, these methods do not withstand attacks based on statistical analysis. In this paper, we propose UNILO, an obfuscation operator which offers high assurances on obfuscation uniformity, even in case of imprecise location measurement. We also deal with service differentiation by proposing three UNILO-based obfuscation algorithms that offer multiple contemporaneous levels of privacy. Finally, we experimentally prove the superiority of the proposed algorithms compared to the state-of-the-art solutions, both in terms of utility and resistance against inference attacks. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V.