Evaluation of location obfuscation techniques for privacy in location based information systems

In recent years, smart-phones and GPS-enabled devices have been a critical factor in the popularization and increasing demand of location based information systems. However, at the same time, the concern of privacy has also increased on users who would like to protect their exact location from attackers or from the service provider. One technique to protect the location is called Location Obfuscation, which consists in non reversible ways to slightly alter the location such that it does not reflect the real location of the user, but still contains enough information to provide a satisfactory service. In this work, the N-Rand, N-Mix and the N-Dispersion techniques are introduced and compared with other two existing techniques, Rand and Distortion, in terms of distance-based metrics. The results show that the N-Rand and N-Dispersion techniques produce a larger minimum distance to the original location, and the greatest average distance to the original path.