Correlation analysis for geo-indistinguishability based continuous LBS queries

The popularity of mobile devices with positioning capability and Internet accessibility in recent years has caused a revolution in the Location Based Services (LBS) market. Unfortunately, without preserving the user's location privacy, LBS providers can collect and log the accurate locations of the service users. Many mechanisms have been developed to preserve the LBS user's location privacy. While said mechanisms have had demonstrable effectiveness with snapshot queries, the shortcoming of supporting continuous queries is their main drawback. Geo-indistinguishability represents an obfuscation-based location privacy notion, which preserves the user's accurate location while allowing an adequate amount of information to be released. Despite its effectiveness and simplicity, geo-indistinguishability notion does not address the potential correlation of the subsequent locations reported within the continuous queries. In this paper, we report our progress on developing an adaptive geo-indistinguishability mechanism for continuous LBS queries. We show the effect of exploiting the correlation of the user's obfuscated locations on the location privacy level. The initial results show the need for an adaptive mechanism that adjusts the amount of noise required to obfuscate the user's location based on the correlation level with its previous obfuscated locations.