Protection of Location Privacy using Dummies for Location-based Services

Recently, highly accurate positioning devices enable us to provide various types of location-based services. On the other hand, because position data obtained by such devices include deeply personal information, protection of location privacy is one of the most significant issues of location-based services. Therefore, we propose a technique to anonymize position data. In our proposed technique, the psrsonal user of a location-based service generates several false position data (dummies) sent to the service provider with the true position data of the user. Because the service provider cannot distinguish the true position data, the user’s location privacy is protected. We conducted performance study experiments on our proposed technique using practical trajectory data. As a result of the experiments, we observed that our proposed technique protects the location privacy of users.