I-Corps: iCloak: Privacy Preserving Individual Location Sharing

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As location information is frequently used for location based applications, mobile users' fear of privacy breach continues to escalate. Current mobile operating systems only provide users with minimal access control, either to block or allow location access, which are ineffective and inefficient in mitigating the privacy threats. Customers are forced to give up their location privacy in exchange for use of location based services or give up location based services in order to protect their location. In this project, the I-Corps team investigates and implements a new customizable and rigorous privacy mechanism (app) which allows mobile users to share a cloaked (approximate) location without deteriorating its utility for location based applications. The proposed technology provides mobile users an easy way to customize their privacy settings, such as when and where to share locations with what precision. In this way, mobile users will benefit from privacy-preserving location sharing with added functionalities of location-based recommendations and social networking. Location service providers and smartphone manufacturers can also integrate this privacy-preserving technique to enhance the privacy protection for users.The proposed mechanism (app) provides a rigorous and customizable privacy framework for users to share their locations with other third parties (e.g. location based service providers, or other users in location based social networks). The privacy guarantee is based on differential privacy, the state-of-art framework for privacy protection, which ensures that even given the knowledge of the user's moving patterns or all possible locations where the user may appear, an attacker still cannot figure out the true location of the user. The cloaked location, on the other hand, also guarantees optimal utility (minimal error) for location based applications, e.g., finding nearest restaurants or friends. In addition, with a user's historical locations, the proposed mechanism can also make personalized location based recommendations according to the user's moving pattern and interest of friends. The project promises significant broader impacts on enabling location based applications with privacy protection for mobile users.