An Improved Dummy Generation Approach for Enhancing User Location Privacy

Location-based services (LBS), which provide personalized and timely information, entail privacy concerns such as unwanted leak of current user locations to potential stalkers. Existing works have proposed dummy generation techniques by creating a cloaking region (CR) such that the user’s location is at a fixed distance from the center of CR. Hence, if the adversary somehow knows the location of the center of CR, the user’s location would be vulnerable to attack. We propose an improved dummy generation approach for facilitating improved location privacy for mobile users. Our performance study demonstrates that our proposed approach is indeed effective in improving user location privacy.