GPS privacy: Enabling Proximity-based Services while Keeping GPS Locations Private

摘要

Location-based services have revolutionized people's everyday lives. Proximity-based services in particular, are commonly used to identify nearby friends and other landmarks. However, these services endanger the privacy of users as the location information is provided to the service provider. In this work, we propose a privacy protection scheme which leverages the low-level data used in GPS location estimation for privacy protection. The anonymous range vector of a user to visible satellites is instead provided to the service provider. The exact location of the user cannot be inferred from the anonymous range vector. An efficient algorithm for proximity detection using the anonymous range vector is presented. A proof of concept of the proximity detection scheme is illustrated using experiments with u-blox LEA-6T receivers and Android phones.