A Comparative Study on Privacy Preserving Techniques for Location Based Services

Abstract

In recent years, enhancement in wireless and mobile technologies, location based services (LBSs) has become more and more popular. Location based services provide enhanced functionalities, they open up new vulnerabilities that can be exploited to cause security and privacy breaches of mobile (wireless) users. Privacy of personal location information in location-based services of vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) users (over road networks) is becoming an increasingly important issue. However, as vehicle users with mobile devices are highly autonomous and heterogeneous. So it is challenging to design generic location privacy protection techniques with desired level of protection. Therefore, here one big question arises “How to secure user’s privacy information must be taken into consideration”? Various approaches have been proposed to protect mobile user’s privacy, including his/her identity, location and so on. This paper reviews and analyzes existing privacy protection research works (according to goals, techniques, etc.) from an integrated perspective and discusses the challenges of securing privacy information. At last, our suggestions for future research work are presented.