Evaluating the Privacy Risk of Location-Based Services

In modern mobile networks, users increasingly share their location with third-parties in return for location-based services. Previous works show that operators of location-based services may identify users based on the shared location information even if users make use of pseudonyms. In this paper, we push the understanding of the privacy risk further. We evaluate the ability of location-based services to identify users and their points of interests based on different sets of location information. We consider real life scenarios of users sharing location information with location-based services and quantify the privacy risk by experimenting with real-world mobility traces.