Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

Spatial Cloaking Revisited: Distinguishing Information Leakage From Anonymity, Kar Way Tan, Yimin Lin, Kyriakos Mouratidis

Kyriakos MOURATIDIS

Location-based services (LBS) are receiving increasing popularity as they provide convenience to mobile users with on-demand information. The use of these services, however, poses privacy issues as the user locations and queries are exposed to untrusted LBSs. Spatial cloaking techniques provide privacy in the form of k-anonymity; i.e., they guarantee that the (location of the) querying user u is indistinguishable from at least k-1 others, where k is a parameter specified by u at query time. To achieve this, they form a group of k users, including u, and forward their minimum bounding rectangle (termed anonymzing spatial region, ASR) to …