GeoSecure-R: Secure Computation of Geographical Distance using Region-anonymized GPS Data

Today Location-Based Services (LBS) are used by millions of users all over the world. These services widely use multimedia sensory data such as GPS location. LBS provides enormous convenience to the users, but at the expense of continuously tracking their location. This raises severe privacy concerns. The distance computation using users’ GPS coordinates is a crucial component in many LBS, such as the fitness tracker app and understanding driving habits. In this paper, we propose a method, called GeoSecure-R, to calculate the distance without revealing the users’ exact location. The proposed method ensures users’ privacy with region anonymity while maintaining utility, i.e., it provides LBS that requires only the traveled distance rather than the actual location of the user. Experimental results on Microsoft’s GeoLife dataset show that the proposed method calculates the distance metric very close to what we get using the actual location of the user.