An Efficient Mechanism to ensure Location Privacy in Telecommunication Service Applications

Location and presence information will provide considerable value to information and communication services. Nevertheless, the users are still concerned about revealing their position data especially to un-trusted third party applications. Furthermore, legal restrictions are effective in most countries that regulate processing of personal data and the protection of privacy in electronic communications. In this paper we propose a novel privacy enhancement solution (PRIVES) which is targeted for location and presence services in the 3G service architecture and uses cryptographic techniques well suited to run in small devices with little computing and power resources. Once a user is granted the permission to localize another user, the location server generates a key used to create pseudonyms that are specific for the localized user. Passed from the watcher to the location server via the application, these pseudonyms identify both the watcher and the desired localized user at the location server, but are opaque to the application. The paper presents architecture and protocols of the proposed solution and discusses the performance increase in comparison with current implementations