Privacy Protection Through Hiding Location Coordinates Using Geometric Transformation Techniques in Location-Based Services Enabled Mobiles

Abstract

Mobile gadgets today are swaggering computing potential and memory at par or at times even higher to that found in desktop personal computers. A wireless interconnection has turned out to be considerably more readily accessible these days. As individuals are growing mobile with regard to the fast lifestyle and working pattern, a new, smarter system came into existence that is termed as “location-based service” (LBS). Such a system amalgamates the location data of a user with smart applications to deliver demanded services. Although LBSs provide major openings for a large variety of markets and remarkable convenience to the end user, it also presents subtle privacy attack to user’s location information. Threat to the privacy sneaks into the system due to the prerequisite of sending user’s current location to the LBS provider to attain related services. Since the volume of data gathered from dynamic or stationary mobile users using LBS can be high, it is vital to outline the frameworks and systems in a manner that is secure and keep the location information private. This can be portrayed as a big mobile data challenge in LBSs setting. This paper aims to explore the issues related to privacy involved in LBSs. In the paper, we introduce framework structure outline for preventing location-based vicinity inference of users who issue a query and also proposed VIC-PRO algorithm which helps to overcome the gaps of well-established K-anonymity approach in the existing system. The suggested approach strengthens the privacy of query initiating vicinity information.