Enhancing Location Privacy for Geolocation Service Through Perturbation

Third party geolocation services have been widely used in various of location dependent scenarios, such like the searching of Internet of things (IoT) and the location-based services (LBSs). Despite the privacy preservation on using geolocation, which has been widely discussed in last decades, the equally severe issue of the privacy preservation on obtaining geolocation gained much fewer efforts from the researchers. In this paper, we propose a location perturbation scheme to protect location privacy in third party geolocation services. On the basis of the fundamental of positioning technologies, we design a perturbing method to blur the real location by adjusting the underlying signal space fingerprint information. Then a differential privacy mechanism is applied to the perturbation process to further strengthen the privacy level. Evaluation result are illustrated to show the practicality of our approach.