Privacy In Location Based Services

This book takes a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the characteristics of Location Based Services (LBS) and the protection of location information in these transactions. Motivated by the importance of location privacy in the current age of mobile devices, this thesis argues that failure to ensure privacy protection under this context is a violation to human rights and poses a detriment to the freedom of users as individuals. Since location information has unique characteristics, existing methods for protecting other type of information are not suitable for geographical transactions. Here, methods that safeguard location information in location based services and that enable geospatial analysis are demonstrated. Through a taxonomy, the characteristics of LBS and privacy techniques are examined and contrasted. Moreover, mechanisms for privacy protection in LBS are presented and the resulting data is tested with different geospatial analysis tools to verify the possibility of conducting these analyses even with protected location