2005c. Simulation of Obfuscation and Negotiation for Location Privacy

Abstract. Current mobile computing systems can automatically sense and com-municate detailed data about a person’s location. Location privacy is an urgent re-search issue because concerns about privacy are seen to be inhibiting the growth of mobile computing. This paper investigates a new technique for safeguarding location privacy, called obfuscation, which protects a person’s location privacy by degrading the quality of information about that person’s location. Obfuscation is based on spatial imperfection and offers an orthogonal approach to conventional techniques for safeguarding information about a person’s location. Imprecision and inaccuracy are two types of imperfection that may be used to achieve obfus-cation. A set of simulations are used to empirically evaluate different obfuscation strategies based on imprecision and inaccuracy. The results show that obfuscation can enable high quality of service in concert with high levels of privacy.