New Privacy Solution for LBS

PhysOrg.com shares the new research from Bugra Gedik, a researcher at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and Ling Liu, an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

While previous attempts at location privacy applications have been made, Gedik and Liu’s system is the first to enable individuals to choose the level of anonymity for different applications, while still providing nearly optimal performance. For example, a cell phone user could send a request for a local gas station offering the most inexpensive gas to a “location-based services” (LBS) provider, and receive an accurate answer even without the provider knowing exactly where the user is located.

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The new system uses an anonymity-based approach called “location k-anonymity.” A user is considered to be location k-anonymous if their location information sent to the LBS provider is indistinguishable from the location information of at least k – 1 other users. In tests, the researchers experimented with k values from 2 to 12, with higher values meaning increased privacy, but also longer search times. In real life, different users could choose different k values for different applications based on their personalized privacy requirements, but the researchers predicted that even the most privacy-conscious users would be satisfied with a k value of 5.