Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Location privacy models in mobile applications: conceptual view and research directions

  • Published:
GeoInformatica Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Location privacy in mobile, location-aware applications is a prominent research topic spanning across different disciplines and with strong societal implications and expectations. The tumultuous growth of the mobile applications market over the past few years has however hindered the development of a systematic organization and classification of location privacy concepts. In this paper we focus on one of the key concepts, i.e. location privacy metric. We survey existing approaches to the measurement of location privacy and propose a classification framework. The notion of location privacy metric, however, cannot be fully understood without describing the context in which these metrics are used. To that extent we elaborate on the notions of application model and privacy model. The ultimate goal is to contribute to the specification of a conceptual framework for location privacy.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Directive 2002/58/EC-Article 9. See: http://eur-lex.europa.eu

  2. European Data Protection Directive (95/46/EC)

  3. The scenario is realistic. For example one of the pioneering location sharing applications, i.e. Google Latitude, was coupled with the geo-location services provided by Google itself

References

  1. Agir B, Papaioannou TG, Narendula R, Aberer K, Hubaux JP (2013) User-side adaptive protection of location privacy in participatory sensing. Geoinformatica, to appear

  2. Andrienko G, Gkoulalas-Divanis A, Gruteser M, Kopp C, Liebig T, Rechert K (2013) Report from Dagstuhl: the liberation of mobile location data and its implications for privacy research. ACM SIGMOBILE Mob Comput Commun Rev 17(2):7–18

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Ardagna CA, Cremonini M, Damiani E, di Vimercati S, Samarati P (2007) Location privacy protection through obfuscation-based techniques. In: 21st annual IFIP WG 11.3 working conference on data and applications security

  4. Article_29_Data_Protection_Working_Party (2011) WP185 Opinion 13/2011 on Geolocation services on smart mobile devices. http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/article-29/documentation/opinion-recommendation/files/2011/wp185_en.pdf. Accessed Feb 2014

  5. Bamba B, Liu L, Pesti P, Wang T (2008) Supporting anonymous location queries in mobile environments with PrivacyGrid. In: Proceedings of WWW

  6. Beresford AR, Stajano F (2003) Location privacy in pervasive computing. IEEE Pervasive Comput 2(1):46–55

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Beresford AR, Stajano F (2004) Mix zones: user privacy in location-aware services. In: Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE annual conference on pervasive computing and communications workshops

  8. Brown J, Ohrimenko O, Tamassia R (2013) Haze: privacy-preserving real-time traffic statistics. arXiv:1309.3515v1 [cs.CR] 13

  9. Chatzikokolakis K, Andrés ME, Bordenabe NE, Palamidessi C (2013) Broadening the scope of differential privacy using metrics. In: Symposium HotPets 2013. OnLine version: http://freehaven.net/anonbib/papers/pets2013/paper_57.pdf

  10. Cheng R, Zhang Y, Bertino E, Prabhakar S (2006) Preserving user location privacy in mobile data management infrastructures. In: Proceedings of the 6th workshop on privacy enhancing technologies

  11. Chow C, Mokbel MF, Aref WG (2009) Casper*: query processing for location services without compromising privacy. ACM Trans Database Syst (34)4

  12. Chow CY, Mokbel MF, Liu X (2006) A peer-to-peer spatial cloaking algorithm for anonymous location-based service. In: Proceedings of ACM GIS

  13. Cornelius C, Kapadia A, Kotz D, Peebles D, Shin M, Triandopoulos N (2008) Anonysense: privacy-aware people-centric sensing. In: Proceedings of ACM MobiSys

  14. Damiani ML (2011) Third party geolocation services in LBS: privacy requirements and research issues. Trans Data Priv 4(2):55–72

    Google Scholar 

  15. Damiani ML (2013) European data protection: coming of age? In: Privacy enhancing techniques for the protection of mobility patterns in LBS: research issues and trends. Springer

  16. Damiani ML, Bertino E, Silvestri C (2008) Protecting location privacy through semantics-aware obfuscation techniques. In: Proceedings of IFIPTM

  17. Damiani ML, Bertino E, Silvestri C (2010) The PROBE framework for the personalized cloaking of private locations. Trans Data Priv 3(2):123–148

    Google Scholar 

  18. Damiani ML, Cuijpers C (2012) Privacy-aware geolocation interfaces for volunteered geography: a case study. In: Proceedings of ACM GEOCROWD

  19. Damiani ML, Galbiati M (2012) Handling user-defined private contexts for location privacy in LBS. In: Proceedings of ACM GIS

  20. Damiani ML, Silvestri C, Bertino E (2011) Fine-grained cloaking of sensitive positions in location-sharing applications. IEEE Pervasive Comput 10(4):64–72

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Deng M, Wuyts K, Scandariato R, Preneel B, Joosen W (2011) A privacy threat analysis framework: supporting the elicitation and fulfillment of privacy requirements. J Requir Eng Spec Issue Digit Priv Theory Policies Technol 16(1):3–32

    Google Scholar 

  22. Duckham M, Kulik L (2006) Location privacy and location aware computing. In: Drummond J (ed) Dynamic & mobile GIS: investigating change in space and time. CRC Press, Boca Rator

  23. Gedik B, Liu L (2005) Location privacy in mobile systems: a personalized anonymization model. In: Proceedings of ICDCS

  24. GEOPRIV. http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/geopriv-charter.html

  25. Ghinita G (2013) Privacy for location-based services. Morgan & Claypool Publishers, San Rafael

  26. Ghinita G, Damiani ML, Silvestri C, Bertino E (2009) Preventing velocity-based linkage attacks in location-aware applications. In: Proceedings of ACM GIS

  27. Ghinita G, Kalnis P, Khoshgozaran A, Shahabi C, Tan K-L (2008) Private queries in location based services: anonymizers are not necessary. In: Proceedings of ACM SIGMOD

  28. Ghinita G, Kalnis P, Skiadopoulos S (2007) PRIVE: anonymous location-based queries in distributed mobile systems. In: Proceedings of WWW

  29. Goetz M, Nath S, Gehrke J (2012) MASKIT: privately releasing user context streams for personalized mobile applications. In: Proceedings of ACM SIGMOD

  30. Gruteser M, Grunwald D (2003) Anonymous usage of location-based services through spatial and temporal cloaking. In: Proceedings of ACM Mobysis

  31. Hoh B, Gruteser M (2005) Protecting location privacy through path confusion. In: Proceedings of international conference on security and privacy for emerging areas in communications networks

  32. Jensen CS, Lu H, Yiu ML (2009) Location privacy techniques in client-server architectures. In: Privacy in location-based applications: research issues and emerging trends. Springer

  33. Kido H, Yanagisawa T, Satoh Y (2005) Protection of location privacy using dummies for location-based services. In: Proceedings of ICDEW

  34. LaMarca A, de Lara E (2008) Location systems. Morgan and Claypool Publishers, San Rafael

  35. Lane ND, Miluzzo E, Lu H, Peebles D, Choudhury T, Campbell AT (2010) A survey of mobile phone sensing. IEEE Commun Mag 48(9):140–150

    Article  Google Scholar 

  36. Lee B, Oh J, Yu J, Kim H (2011) Protecting location privacy using location semantics. In: Proceedings of ACM SIGKDD

  37. Lu H, Jensen CS, Yiu ML (2008) Pad: privacy-area aware, dummy-based location privacy in mobile services. In: Proceedings of ACM international workshop on data engineering for wireless and mobile access

  38. Mascetti S, Freni D, Bettini C, Wang XS, Jajodia S (2011) Privacy in geo-social networks: proximity notification with untrusted service providers and curious buddies. VLDB J 20(4):541–566

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. Mokbel MF, Chow WG, Aref C-Y (2006) The new Casper: query processing for location services without compromising privacy. In: Proceedings of VLDB, pp 763–774

  40. Mouratidis K, Yiu ML (2010) Anonymous query processing in road networks. IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng 22(1):2–15

    Article  Google Scholar 

  41. Myles G, Friday A, Davies N (2003) Preserving privacy in environments with location-based applications. IEEE Pervasive Comput 2:56–64

    Article  Google Scholar 

  42. Nissembaum H (2011) A contextual approach to privacy online. Dedalus, J Am Acad Arts Sci 140(4):32–48

    Google Scholar 

  43. Palanisamy B, Liu L (2011) Mobimix: protecting location privacy with mix-zones over road networks. In: Proceedings of IEEE ICDE

  44. Parent C, Spaccapietra S, Renso C, Andrienko G, Andrienko N, Bogorny V, Damiani ML, Gkoulalas-Divanis A, Macedo J, Pelekis N, Theodoridis Y, Yan Z (2013) Semantic trajectories modeling and analysis. ACM Comput Surv 45(4):42:1–42:32

    Article  Google Scholar 

  45. Rechert K, Meier K, Zahoransky R, Wehrle D, von Suchodoletz D, Greschbach B, Wohlgemuth S, Echizen I (2013) Reclaiming location privacy in mobile telephony networks—effects and consequences for providers and subscribers. IEEE Syst J 7(2):211–222

    Article  Google Scholar 

  46. Ruiz-Vicente C, Freni D, Bettini C, Jensen CS (2011) Location-related privacy in geo-social networks. IEEE Internet Computs 15:20–27

    Article  Google Scholar 

  47. Shokri R, Theodorakopoulos G, Le Boudec JY, Hubaux JP (2011) Quantifying location privacy. In: IEEE symposium on security and privacy

  48. Shokri R, Theodorakopoulos G, Troncoso C, Hubaux JP, Le Boudec JY (2012) Protecting location privacy: optimal strategy against localization attacks. In: Proceedings of CCS

  49. Shokri R, Troncoso C, Diaz C, Freudiger J, Hubaux JP (2010) Unraveling an old cloak: k-anonymity for location privacy. In: Proceedings of WPES

  50. Solove D (2013) Privacy self-management and the consent dilemma. Harv Law Rev 123:1880–1902

    Google Scholar 

  51. Sweeney L (2002) Achieving k-anonymity privacy protection using generalization and suppression. Int J Uncertain Fuzziness Knowl-Based Syst 10:571–588

    Article  Google Scholar 

  52. Tavani HT, Moor JH (2001) Privacy protection, control of information, and privacy-enhancing technologies. ACM SIGCAS Comput Soc 31(1):6–11

    Article  Google Scholar 

  53. Toch E, Ravichandran R, Cranor LF, Drielsma PH, Hong J, Kelley PG, Sadeh N, Tsai JY (2009) Analyzing use of privacy policy attributes in a location sharing application. In: Proceedings of symposium on usable privacy and security (SOUP)

  54. Vicente CR, Assent I, Jensen CS (2011) Effective privacy-preserving online route planning. In: Proceedings of MDM

  55. W3C (2012) Geolocation API specification. http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source.html

  56. Westin A (1970) Privacy and freedom. Bodley Head

  57. Xue M, Kalnis P, Pung HK (2009) Location diversity: enhanced privacy protection in location based services. In: Proceedings of international symposium on location and context awareness (LoCA)

  58. Yigitoglu E, Damiani ML, Abul O, Silvestri C (2012) Privacy-preserving sharing of sensitive semantic locations under road-network constraints. In: IEEE MDM

  59. Yiu ML, Jensen CS, Huang X, Lu H (2008) SpaceTwist: managing the trade-offs among location privacy, query performance, and query accuracy in mobile services. In: Proceedings of ICDE

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Milan, Via Comelico 39, 20135, Milan, Italy

    Maria Luisa Damiani

Authors
  1. Maria Luisa Damiani
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Maria Luisa Damiani.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Damiani, M.L. Location privacy models in mobile applications: conceptual view and research directions. Geoinformatica 18, 819–842 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10707-014-0205-7

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10707-014-0205-7

Keywords

Search

Navigation