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In a Location-Based Service, such as Google map or Bing map under a cloud computing environment, a user/client is allowed to issue queries (e.g. containing user’s GPS location) to retrieve k nearest Point-Of-Interests around user’s physical location from database server. With the voluminous sales of smart phones which are mostly equipped with GPS, location-based service is gaining more and more popularity. For example, Twitter’s recent integration of user location in Tweets has helped increase the use of the location-based services. Facebook too is following suit, launching its own location-based service, Facebook Places. However, one of the concerns using these services is the negative effects on privacy.
Consider the following scenario (Saint-Jean, 2005): Alice is looking for gold in California. What Alice does is look for a place with a little gold and follow the trace. Now, Alice wants to find gold in a place where no mining patent has been awarded, but many patents have been awarded in California during the gold rush. What Alice does is to walk around California with a GPS and a notebook computer. Whenever she finds a trace of gold she follows it querying if any patent has been awarded in that location. If she finds a trace of gold in a piece of land with no issued patent she can request the patent and start mining for gold.
The problem is that she is worried that Bob’s Mining Patents Inc., the service she queries the patents from, might cheat on her. Because Bob knows she is looking for gold in California (Alice said so when signing up for Bob’s service), he knows that, if she queries from some location, then there is gold there. So, if she queries a location and there is no patent awarded, Bob may run to the patent office and get the mining patent for that location.
Within a pervasive computing environment today (Asonov, 2004), many negative effects, in addition to the scenario mentioned above, could be associated with failure to protect location privacy. For examples: 1. Location-based “spam”: Location could be used by unscrupulous businesses to bombard an individual with unsolicited marketing for products or services related to that individual’s location. 2. Personal wellbeing and safety: Location is inextricably linked to personal safety. Unrestricted access to information about an individual’s location could potentially lead to harmful encounters, for example stalking or physical attacks. 3. Intrusive inferences: Location constrains our access to spatiotemporal resources, like meetings, medical facilities, our homes, or even crime scenes. Therefore, location can be used to infer other personal information about an individual, such as that individual’s political views, state of health, or personal preferences.