Which cloak dresses you best?: comparing location cloaking methods for mobile users

Abstract

Location cloaking methods enable the protection of private location data. Different temporal and spatial approaches to cloak a specific user location (e.g., k-anonymity) have been suggested. Besides the research focusing on functionality, little work has been done on how cloaking methods should be presented to the user. In practice common location referencing services force the user to either accept or deny exact positioning. Therefore, users are not enabled to regulate private location information on a granular level. To improve the usage of location cloaking methods and foster location privacy protection, we conducted a user study (N = 24) comparing different visualized cloaking methods. The results of our lab study revealed a preference for visualizations using already known and well understood real world entities. Thus, the usage of simple and real world concepts can contribute to the application of cloaking methods and subsequently to location privacy protection.