A Novel Location Privacy-Preserving Approach Based on Blockchain

Location-based services (LBS) bring convenience to people’s lives but are also accompanied with privacy leakages. To protect the privacy of LBS users, many location privacy protection algorithms were proposed. However, these algorithms often have difficulty to maintain a balance between service quality and user privacy. In this paper, we first overview the shortcomings of the existing two privacy protection architectures and privacy protection technologies, then we propose a location privacy protection method based on blockchain. Our method satisfies the principle of k-anonymity privacy protection and does not need the help of trusted third-party anonymizing servers. The combination of multiple private blockchains can disperse the user’s transaction records, which can provide users with stronger location privacy protection and will not reduce the quality of service. We also propose a reward mechanism to encourage user participation. Finally, we implement our approach in the Remix blockchain to show the efficiency, which further indicates the potential application prospect for the distributed network environment.