Using Dummy Locations to Conceal Whereabouts of Mobile Users in Location-Based Services

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.46328/ijonest.126

Keywords:

Mobile computing, Security and privacy, Dummy locations, Location-based services, Smartphones

Abstract

Location-based services are extremely popular in these days. Mobile users use the services such as GPS and Google Maps almost every day to assist their daily activities like finding a restaurant or looking for an apartment. However, in order to use the services, users have to share their location information with the service providers. This requirement may hold back the service adaptation since users may not like to share their locations with others. One common method to preserve user privacy is to send a couple of dummy locations along with the true location to the service providers, so the provider would not be able to tell which location is true. This method is simple and effective, but it also has some drawbacks that make the privacy safeguarding fragile. If the dummy locations are not carefully planned, they may land on wild fields or water and could be easily perceived as fake. This research investigates the flaws of using dummy locations to uphold user privacy from both the users’ and service providers’ points of view, and proposes innovative methods to close the loopholes, so more users will be willing to use location-based services.

Author Biographies

Sanjaikanth E Vadakkethil Somanathan Pillai, University of North Dakota

Wen-Chen Hu, University of North Dakota

Wen-Chen Hu received a BE, an ME, an MS, and a PhD, all in Computer Science, from Tamkang University, Taiwan, the National Central University, Taiwan, the University of Iowa, Iowa City, and the University of Florida, Gainesville, in 1984, 1986, 1993, and 1998, respectively. He is currently an associate professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks. He was an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the Auburn University, Alabama, for years. He is the general chairs of about 20 international conferences such as the 2018 International Conference on Engineering, Technology, and Applied Science (ICETA 2018), and associate editors of several journals like Journal of Information Technology Research (JITR). In addition, he has acted more than 100 positions as editors and editorial advisory/review board members of international journals/books, and track/session chairs and program committee members of international conferences. He has also won a couple of awards of best papers, best reviewers, and community services. Dr. Hu has been teaching for more than 20 years at the US universities and over 10 different computer/IT-related courses, and advising/consulting more than 100 graduate students. He has published over 100 articles in refereed journals, conference proceedings, books, and encyclopedias, edited more than 10 books and conference proceedings, was the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Handheld Computing Research (IJHCR) from 2010 to 2017, and solely authored a book entitled “Internet-enabled handheld devices, computing, and programming: mobile commerce and personal data applications.” He is a member of ACM (Association of the Computing Machinery). His current research interests include (mobile) data research and applications such as (mobile) data security & mining, and mobile/smartphone/spatial/web computing.

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Published

2023-06-15

Issue

Vol. 4 No. 4 (2022)

Section

Technology

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