A Privacy preserving method using privacy enhancing techniques for location based services

Two of the major changes within computing, at the present time, are the move towards service-oriented architectures and the increasing usage of mobile devices to access these services. Along with this, as these devices are often moving, extra context information can be provided to a service, if the user is known, along with their actual location and their current trajectory. This includes useful applications such as providing the nearest bus stop to a user, and thus to show the buses which are due to arrive next. While this type of information is useful to the user for services that are trusted, there can be many issues related to the gathering of location information for non-trusted applications, such as for location-based marketing, or for user behaviour profiling. With simple security controls being applied to the access of the location information from mobile devices, it is important that users understand how their location information is being used. This paper reviews some of the current methods which are being proposed in order to reduce the impact of location tracking on user privacy, and presents a novel encryption method for preserving the location of a device, using Privacy-Enhancing Technologies, and which preserves the trajectory of the path of a user