LP-Cache: Privacy-aware Cache Model for Location-based Apps

The daily use of smartphones along with third-party apps, which involve location data to be continuously collected, shared and used, have become a significant privacy concern. Besides, taking advantage of the rapid growth of wireless access points, the capability of these location-based services to track users' lives, even sometimes with their consent, creates an urgent need for the development of more user-friendly and socially-accepted approaches to location privacy preservation. In this paper, we introduce a novel privacy-aware model for location-based apps to overcome the shortcomings related to user privacy during the location calculation process. By making the user device play a bigger role in the process, our model prevents users from relying on service providers' trustworthiness. The model applies a cache-based technique to determine the position of client devices by means of wireless access points and achieve data minimisation in the current process. The model also establishes new personalised permission settings for the users while sharing their location information. We outline possible implementation of the proposal, and preliminary findings of the work-in-progress evaluation on the wireless data feasibility and usability that demonstrate deployment viability.