Location privacy models in mobile applications: conceptual view and research directions

Geoinformatica (2014) 18:819842 DOI 10.1007/s10707-014-0205-7

Location privacy models in mobile applications: conceptual view and research directions

Maria Luisa Damiani

Received: 5 June 2013 / Revised: 10 January 2014 / Accepted: 3 February 2014 / Published online: 13 March 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Abstract Location privacy in mobile, location-aware applications is a prominent research topic spanning across different disciplines and with strong societal implications and expectations. The tumultuous growth of the mobile applications market over the past few years has however hindered the development of a systematic organization and classification of location privacy concepts. In this paper we focus on one of the key concepts, i.e. location privacy metric. We survey existing approaches to the measurement of location privacy and propose a classification framework. The notion of location privacy metric, however, cannot be fully understood without describing the context in which these metrics are used. To that extent we elaborate on the notions of application model and privacy model. The ultimate goal is to contribute to the specification of a conceptual framework for location privacy.

Keywords Location privacy Location privacy metric Location-aware applications

1 Introduction

Individual location is an enabling factor in a variety of mobile applications such as location-based services (LBS), mobile sensing, geo-location services, location sharing in social networks. In all such applications the users location is communicated to a third party. This raises challenging issues for privacy because location and in particular the history of locations (trajectories) can reveal details about an individuals personal life. Sharing location data with potentially untrustworthy parties, e.g. service providers and even members of a community, may thus result in a loss of control that exposes data to possible abuses.

In most countries, location data cannot be collected without providing users with privacy guarantees in compliance with data protection legislation which contains obligations for data controllers (e.g. application providers) and rights and guarantees for data subjects

M. L. Damiani ([envelopeback])

Department of Computer Science, University of Milan, Via Comelico 39, 20135 Milan, Italy e-mail: mailto:[e-mail]

Web End =[e-mail]

820 Geoinformatica (2014) 18:819842

(i.e. users). For example, in Europe, the ePrivacy Directive1 indicates that location data other than traffic data (e.g. public communications networks logs) may only be processed when users are made anonymous or with...