Location Privacy Through Users' Collaboration: A Distributed Pseudonymizer

Abstract

Mobile devices able to locate themselves such as mobile phones and PDAs are virtually everywhere, and they are expected to gain more importance in the near future. Their ability to determine locations opens the door to a new bunch of services: the so-called location-based services (LBS). The commercial sector will highly benefit from LBS. However, they are not without a cost — privacy. In this article we present a (trusted third party)-free, distributed, collaborative method to preserve the location privacy of LBS users.