TY - GEN
T1 - Towards Privacy-Aware Location-Based database servers
AU - Mokbel, Mohamed F.
PY - 2006/1/1
Y1 - 2006/1/1
N2 - The wide spread of location-based services results in a strong market for location-detection devices (e.g., GPS-like devices, RFIDs, handheld devices, and cellular phones). Examples of location-based services include location-Aware emergency service, location-based advertisement, live traffic reports, and location-based store finder. However, location-detection devices pose a major privacy threat on its users where it transmits private information (i.e., the location) to the server who may be untrustworthy. The existing model of location-based applications trades service with privacy where if a user wants to keep her private location information, she has to turn off her location-detection device, i.e., unsubscribe from the service. This paper tackles this model in a way that protects the user privacy while keeping the functionality of location-based services. The main idea is to employ a trusted third party, the Location Anonymizer, that expands the user location into a spatial region such that: (1) The exact user location can lie anywhere in the spatial region, and (2) There are k other users within the expanded spatial region so that each user is k-Anonymous. The location-based database server is equipped with additional functionalities that support spatio-Temporal queries based on the spatial region received from the location anonymizer rather than the exact point location received from the user.
AB - The wide spread of location-based services results in a strong market for location-detection devices (e.g., GPS-like devices, RFIDs, handheld devices, and cellular phones). Examples of location-based services include location-Aware emergency service, location-based advertisement, live traffic reports, and location-based store finder. However, location-detection devices pose a major privacy threat on its users where it transmits private information (i.e., the location) to the server who may be untrustworthy. The existing model of location-based applications trades service with privacy where if a user wants to keep her private location information, she has to turn off her location-detection device, i.e., unsubscribe from the service. This paper tackles this model in a way that protects the user privacy while keeping the functionality of location-based services. The main idea is to employ a trusted third party, the Location Anonymizer, that expands the user location into a spatial region such that: (1) The exact user location can lie anywhere in the spatial region, and (2) There are k other users within the expanded spatial region so that each user is k-Anonymous. The location-based database server is equipped with additional functionalities that support spatio-Temporal queries based on the spatial region received from the location anonymizer rather than the exact point location received from the user.
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U2 - 10.1109/ICDEW.2006.152
DO - 10.1109/ICDEW.2006.152
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84990946182
T3 - ICDEW 2006 - Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Data Engineering Workshops
BT - ICDEW 2006 - Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Data Engineering Workshops
A2 - Zhou, Xiaofang
A2 - Barga, Roger S.
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 22nd International Conference on Data Engineering Workshops, ICDEW 2006
Y2 - 3 April 2006 through 7 April 2006
ER -