A Control-Theoretic Approach for Location Privacy in Mobile Applications

The prevalent use of mobile applications using location information to improve the quality of their service has arisen privacy issues, particularly regarding the extraction of user's points on interest. Many studies in the literature focus on presenting algorithms that allow to protect the user of such applications. However, these solutions often require a high level of expertise to be understood and tuned properly. In this paper, the first control-based approach of this problem is presented. The protection algorithm is considered as the “physical” plant and its parameters as control signals that enable to guarantee privacy despite user's mobility pattern. The following of the paper presents the first control formulation of POI-related privacy measure, as well as dynamic modeling and a simple yet efficient PI control strategy. The evaluation using simulated mobility records shows the relevance and efficiency of the presented approach.