A Closer Look at Cloaking Techniques for Location Privacy Claudia Diaz, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. |
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There is a rich collection of literature that aims at
protecting the privacy of users querying location-based
services. One of the most popular location privacy techniques
consists in cloaking users' locations such that k users appear
as potential senders of a query, thus achieving k-anonymity.
We discuss the effectiveness of k-anonymity approaches for
protecting location privacy in the presence of various types
of adversaries. The unraveling of the scheme unfolds the
inconsistency between its components, mainly the cloaking
mechanism and the k-anonymity metric. We show that
constructing cloaking regions based on the users' locations
does not reliably relate to location privacy, and argue that
this technique may even be detrimental to users0 location
privacy. The uncovered flaws imply that existing k-anonymity
scheme is a tattered cloak for protecting location
privacy.
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