Virtual Scent: Obscuring User Location without Compromising Privacy and Accuracy

Abstract

With the spread of mobile devices with positioning systems like GPS, user locations can be obtained in realtime with great accuracy. However, these realtime and accurate location information allows malicious people to identify users in the real space, which causes serious loss of anonymity. Though users can be anonymized with noises on their location, quality of location services would be also degraded. This paper proposes Virtual Scent, which is a novel method to obscure user locations without compromising k-anonymity as well as accuracy. Virtual Scent shows its users as ambiguous “scents” on a map, which can anonymize them. Though each scent has a noise on its location, they are positioned to be mixed up at a most likely location. We evaluate Virtual Scent with thorough simulation and experiments, which reveal its accuracy and practicality.