Location Privacy Protection for Smartphone Users

As smartphones are increasingly used to run apps that provide users with location-based services, the users' location privacy has become a major concern. Existing solutions to this concern are deficient in terms of practicality, efficiency, and effectiveness. To address this problem, we design, implement, and evaluate LP-Guardian, a novel and comprehensive framework for location privacy protection for Android smartphone users. LP-Guardian's overcomes the shortcomings of existing approaches by addressing the tracking, profiling, and identification threats while maintaining app functionality. We have implemented and evaluated LP-Guardian's on Android 4.3.1. Our evaluation results show that LP-Guardian's effectively thwarts the privacy threats, without deteriorating the user's experience (less than 10% overhead in delay and energy). Also, LP-Guardian's privacy protection is shown to be achieved at a tolerable loss in app functionality.