Leveraging Smartphone Advances for Continuous Location Privacy

Location privacy preservation algorithms for nearby points-of-interest (POI) search have evolved in the recent years. However, a majority of the proposals assume that points of interests are ranked only by distance, and demand extensive architectural changes. As a result, a significant gap remains between academic proposals and the industry standard of implementing location based services. Recent advances in mobile device capabilities, more specifically in their computational power and energy efficiency, have opened the possibility of engaging the client hardware more actively in the execution of a privacy algorithm, thereby relaxing strong dependencies on trusted third parties or the service provider. With this motivation, we propose a novel privacy algorithm for use in POI search that achieves much of the desired location privacy by restricting the usage of precise location data to the client device.