Preserving privacy in the context of location based services through location hider in mobile-tourism

Location based services (LBS) provide several conveniences for tourists based on the location-context. For example, whenever tourists visit any place of interest, mobile LBS can help locate resources, navigate to a destination, accomplish location-specific services, etc. LBS offer pervasive services to tourists based on the location-context, and could be seen as a ubiquitous tour guide. However, the privacy and security concerns of tourists are considered a major obstacle toward widespread adoption of LBS in the tourism industry. While a significant amount of research and development has focused on user-friendly design and implementation of tourism-based LBS, there has been much fewer efforts toward enhancing privacy during these interactions. To address the privacy related issues, this work focuses on two methodologies to ensure better privacy based on an intermediary location hider between LBS app and service providers that creates a cloaked region when sending the query in both static and dynamic (movement) contexts. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method. © 2016, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.