A Privacy Preserving Method Using Privacy Enhancing Techniques for Location Based Services

The move towards service-oriented architectures and the increasing usage of mobile devices to access such services are two of the major changes in modern computing. Information about the user, their location and their trajectory can provide additional context information to a service, leading to useful applications such as directing a user to the nearest bus stop and displaying which buses are due to arrive in the next minutes. While this type of information can be useful, when the offered services are trusted, it also introduces privacy issues relating to gathering of location information for non-trusted applications like location-based marketing or user behaviour profiling. Users can limit their location information provided to a service but these controls are simple, making it important for the user to understand how their location information is being used by services. This paper reviews some of the methods currently being proposed to reduce the impact of location tracking on user privacy, and presents a novel encryption method for preserving the location and trajectory path of a user using Privacy-Enhancing Technologies.