Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Entropy-Based Privacy Against Profiling Of User Mobility, Alicia Rodriguez-Carrion, David Rebollo-Monedero, Jordi Forne, Celeste Campo, Carlos Garcia-Rubio, Javier Parra-Arnau, Sajal K. Das

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Location-based services (LBSs) flood mobile phones nowadays, but their use poses an evident privacy risk. The locations accompanying the LBS queries can be exploited by the LBS provider to build the user profile of visited locations, which might disclose sensitive data, such as work or home locations. The classic concept of entropy is widely used to evaluate privacy in these scenarios, where the information is represented as a sequence of independent samples of categorized data. However, since the LBS queries might be sent very frequently, location profiles can be improved by adding temporal dependencies, thus becoming mobility profiles, where location …