An efficient method for privacy preserving location queries

Recently, the issue of privacy preserving location queries has attracted much research. However, there are few works focusing on the tradeoff between location privacy preservation and location query information collection. To tackle this kind of tradeoff, we propose the privacy persevering location query (PLQ), an efficient privacy preserving location query processing framework. This framework can enable the location-based query without revealing user location information. The framework can also facilitate location-based service providers to collect some information about the location based query, which is useful in practice. PLQ consists of three key components, namely, the location anonymizer at the client side, the privacy query processor at the server side, and an additional trusted third party connecting the client and server. The location anonymizer blurs the user location into a cloaked area based on a map-hierarchy. The map-hierarchy contains accurate regions that are partitioned according to real landforms. The privacy query processor deals with the requested nearest-neighbor (NN) location based query. A new convex hull of polygon (CHP) algorithm is proposed for nearest-neighbor queries using a polygon cloaked area. The experimental results show that our algorithms can efficiently process location based queries