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Perturbed-Location Mechanism for Increased User-Location Privacy in Proximity Detection and Digital Contact-Tracing Applications

Future social networks will rely heavily on sensing data collected from users’ mobile and wearable devices. A crucial component of such sensing will be the full or partial access to user’s location data, in order to enable various location-based and proximity-detection-based services. A timely examp...

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Autores principales: Lohan, Elena Simona, Shubina, Viktoriia, Niculescu, Dragoș
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8780374/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35062648
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s22020687
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author Lohan, Elena Simona
Shubina, Viktoriia
Niculescu, Dragoș
author_facet Lohan, Elena Simona
Shubina, Viktoriia
Niculescu, Dragoș
author_sort Lohan, Elena Simona
collection PubMed
description Future social networks will rely heavily on sensing data collected from users’ mobile and wearable devices. A crucial component of such sensing will be the full or partial access to user’s location data, in order to enable various location-based and proximity-detection-based services. A timely example of such applications is the digital contact tracing in the context of infectious-disease control and management. Other proximity-detection-based applications include social networking, finding nearby friends, optimized shopping, or finding fast a point-of-interest in a commuting hall. Location information can enable a myriad of new services, among which we have proximity-detection services. Addressing efficiently the location privacy threats remains a major challenge in proximity-detection architectures. In this paper, we propose a location-perturbation mechanism in multi-floor buildings which highly protects the user location, while preserving very good proximity-detection capabilities. The proposed mechanism relies on the assumption that the users have full control of their location information and are able to get some floor-map information when entering a building of interest from a remote service provider. In addition, we assume that the devices own the functionality to adjust to the desired level of accuracy at which the users disclose their location to the service provider. Detailed simulation-based results are provided, based on multi-floor building scenarios with hotspot regions, and the tradeoff between privacy and utility is thoroughly investigated.
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spelling pubmed-87803742022-01-22 Perturbed-Location Mechanism for Increased User-Location Privacy in Proximity Detection and Digital Contact-Tracing Applications Lohan, Elena Simona Shubina, Viktoriia Niculescu, Dragoș Sensors (Basel) Article Future social networks will rely heavily on sensing data collected from users’ mobile and wearable devices. A crucial component of such sensing will be the full or partial access to user’s location data, in order to enable various location-based and proximity-detection-based services. A timely example of such applications is the digital contact tracing in the context of infectious-disease control and management. Other proximity-detection-based applications include social networking, finding nearby friends, optimized shopping, or finding fast a point-of-interest in a commuting hall. Location information can enable a myriad of new services, among which we have proximity-detection services. Addressing efficiently the location privacy threats remains a major challenge in proximity-detection architectures. In this paper, we propose a location-perturbation mechanism in multi-floor buildings which highly protects the user location, while preserving very good proximity-detection capabilities. The proposed mechanism relies on the assumption that the users have full control of their location information and are able to get some floor-map information when entering a building of interest from a remote service provider. In addition, we assume that the devices own the functionality to adjust to the desired level of accuracy at which the users disclose their location to the service provider. Detailed simulation-based results are provided, based on multi-floor building scenarios with hotspot regions, and the tradeoff between privacy and utility is thoroughly investigated. MDPI 2022-01-17 /pmc/articles/PMC8780374/ /pubmed/35062648 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s22020687 Text en © 2022 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Lohan, Elena Simona
Shubina, Viktoriia
Niculescu, Dragoș
Perturbed-Location Mechanism for Increased User-Location Privacy in Proximity Detection and Digital Contact-Tracing Applications
title Perturbed-Location Mechanism for Increased User-Location Privacy in Proximity Detection and Digital Contact-Tracing Applications
title_full Perturbed-Location Mechanism for Increased User-Location Privacy in Proximity Detection and Digital Contact-Tracing Applications
title_fullStr Perturbed-Location Mechanism for Increased User-Location Privacy in Proximity Detection and Digital Contact-Tracing Applications
title_full_unstemmed Perturbed-Location Mechanism for Increased User-Location Privacy in Proximity Detection and Digital Contact-Tracing Applications
title_short Perturbed-Location Mechanism for Increased User-Location Privacy in Proximity Detection and Digital Contact-Tracing Applications
title_sort perturbed-location mechanism for increased user-location privacy in proximity detection and digital contact-tracing applications
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8780374/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35062648
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s22020687
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