A Generalization-Based POI Query Privacy Preserving Scheme

Point of interest (POI) is a special kind of point location that combines some information that people may find useful or interesting. Thus, POI query may disclose directly people's sensitive information. Current location anonymity schemes do not pay close attention to information added to locations, whereas cryptographic-based privacy information retrieval (PIR) protocol is too complex for the POI query. This paper studies the problem of privacy preserving in POI query system. Based on characteristics of POI category architecture, we present a generation based k-anonymity POI query scheme. Main idea of the proposed scheme is to decrease the ability of leaking privacy information by using the generalized characteristic of POI architecture. Other advantages of the proposed strategy are as follows: it is a personalized location preserving strategy, and it can be implemented easily on smart mobile devices without supporting of any third part.