How Much Room before you Rely: Balancing Privacy Control and Fidelity in the Location-based Pervasive Applications

Rapid development of innovative location-centric applications promoted through widespread proliferation of wireless technology and availability of small handheld devices have brought about a new era in pervasive computing. Besides, they are constantly challenged by individual privacy protection necessities as the location information are stored and exchanged among entities and service providers. In this paper, we attempt to categorize location-centric pervasive applications based on the utility and flexibility on imposing privacy measures. Our first category of applications "Services based on location constraints" provide less options for privacy protection, while the second one "Location-centric statistical query services" allows more control of privacy on the clients' side. But once again giving away too much control to regulate priva.cy on the client side also undermines the quality and fidelity of the applications. We discuss some of the research issues of the privacy flexible framework for location-centric application, ,the costs incurred upon losing fidelity and wayouts to cope with them without compromising privacy in the first place. The framework introduces an interesting class of applications where users relish on the balance of location privacy protection and fidelity of the application.