New Privacy-Preserving Method for Matching Location Data

The development of the GPS has recently increased the demand for the beneficial services from the mobile users' location data. If the location data are collected from various organizations, more beneficial services will be provided. However, the organizations are never able to share their location data, because they must avoid their users' privacy information leakage. Therefore, we propose a new system that (i) organizations transform the location data into secured location data that protects users' location information and send them to the third party called mediator and, (ii) the mediator provides beneficial services from the secured location data. We focus on the service that the mediator finds users who are nearby from all users over multiple organizations (one-to-many private location matching). In previous techniques, a user can judge another user (e.g., his/her friend) is close or not by using the secured location data (one-to-one private location matching). We also propose a new scheme that the mediator can perform one-to-many matching without users' privacy information leakage. Our scheme is the first result that realizes one-to-many matching without users' huge task and leaking their privacy.