Evaluation of an Entropy-based k-Anonymity Model for Location Based Services

As the market for cellular telephones, and other mobile devices, keeps growing, the demand for new services arises to attract the end users. Location Based Services (LBS) are becoming important to the success and attractiveness of next generation wireless systems. To access location-based services, mobile users have to disclose their location information to service providers and third party applications. This raises privacy concerns, which have hampered the widespread use of LBS. Location privacy mechanisms include Anonymization, Obfuscation, Policy Based Scheme, k-anonymity and Adding Fake Events. However most existing solutions adopt the k-anonymity principle. We propose an entropy based location privacy mechanism to protect user information against attackers. We look at the effectiveness of the technique in a continuous LBS scenarios, i.e., where users are moving and recurrently requesting for Location Based Services, we also evaluate the overall performance of the system with its drawbacks.