SpaceTwist: A Flexible Approach for Hiding Query User Location

Speaker: Ken YIU Man Lung

Abstract

Recently, location-based service users are increasingly aware of their privacy ? they hope to enjoy location-based services without disclosing their exact locations. Existing location privacy protection methods can be broadly classified into: (i) spatial cloaking techniques, and (ii) cryptographic matching solutions. The former requires complex server implementations and transmits huge number of unnecessary candidate objects over communication network. On the other hand, the latter does not offer guarantee on result accuracy. To overcome all above problems, we propose a novel approach, called SpaceTwist, for hiding query user location. Its main advantages are: a high degree of privacy protection can be achieved, user has flexible control over the search process dynamically, and server implementation is simple. In addition, we develop a granular searching technique to reduce communication cost while guaranteeing accuracy bound of returned results. Experimental results on real datasets show that our technique retrieves results with good accuracy at low communication cost.