ENHANCING PRIVACY FOR USERS USING LOCATION BASED SERVICES

Location - based services (LBS) require users to continuously report their location to a potentially untrusted server to obtain services based on their location, which ca n expose them to privacy risks. Unfortunately, existing privacy - preserving techniques for LBS have several limitations, such as requiring a fully - trusted third party, offering limited privacy guarantees and incurring high communication overhead. In this pa per, we propose a user - defined privacy grid system called dynamic matrix framework (DMF); the first holistic system that fulfills four essential requirements for privacy - preserving snapshot and continuous LBS. (1) The system only requires a semi - trusted th ird party, responsible for carrying out simple matching operations correctly. This semi - trusted third party does not have any information about a user’s location. (2) Secure snapshot and continuous location privacy is guaranteed under our defined adversary models. (3) The communication cost for the user does not depend on the user’s desired privacy level, it only depends on the number of relevant points of interest in the vicinity of the user. (4) Although we only focus on range and k - nearest - neighbor queri es in this work, our system can be easily extended to support other spatial queries without changing the algorithms run by the semi - trusted third party and the database server, provided the required search area of a spatial query can be abstracted into spa tial regions.