ResPred: A Privacy Preserving Location Prediction System Ensuring Location-based Service Utility

摘要

Location prediction and location privacy has retained a lot of attention recent years. Predicting locations is the next step of Location-Based Services (LBS) because it provides information not only based on where you are but where you will be. However, obtaining information from LBS has a price for the user because she must share all her locations with the service that builds a predictive model, resulting in a loss of privacy. In this paper we propose ResPred, a system that allows LBS to request location prediction about the user. The system includes a location prediction component containing a statistical location trend model and a location privacy component aiming at blurring the predicted locations by finding an appropriate tradeoff between LBS utility and user privacy, the latter being expressed as a maximum percentage of utility loss. We evaluate ResPred from a utility/privacy perspective by comparing our privacy mechanism with existing techniques by using real user locations. The location privacy is evaluated with an entropy-based confusion metric of an adversary during a location inference attack. The results show that our mechanism provides the best utility/privacy tradeoff and a location prediction accuracy of 60% in average for our model.