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You are where you’ve been |
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Technological threats to your location privacy |
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Authorised By :: School of Surveying & Spatial Information Systems
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Matt Duckham is a Senior Lecturer in GIScience at the Department of Geomatics, University of Melbourne, Australia. His research centers on distributed and robust computation with uncertain spatial and spatiotemporal information, especially within the domain of mobile, location-aware, and sensor-enabled systems. He has published extensively in the areas of location-based services and location privacy; geosensor networks and decentralized spatial computing; spatial information fusion; vagueness, uncertainty, and granularity in spatial information; spatial data quality; and computational geometry. Matt has published three books, including co-authoring the second edition of the major GIScience text book "GIS: A computing Perspective". In 2007 he co-chaired the international Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT'07) in Melbourne and two other international workshops (DG/SUM'07 in Melbourne on distributed and mobile spatial computing, and PALMS'07 in Mannheim, Germany on privacy in location-based services). |
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Obfuscation: Location privacy protection through spatial information hiding
Abstract Common mobile location-aware devices, like mobile phones and PDAs, can track a user's location and share this information wirelessly with remote information service providers. As a result, users of mobile devices are increasingly vulnerable to invasions of location privacy: unauthorized collection and use of private location information.
Deliberately adding uncertainty to spatial information, termed "obfuscation", has the effect of "blurring" or "hiding" information about a user's exact location, thus protecting that user’s location privacy. Using obfuscation, individuals may choose to reveal varying degrees of information about their location (for example, region, state, city, suburb, block, street, or precise coordinate-level information).
Revealing less detailed location information leads to greater location privacy, but may also lead to decreased quality or reliability of the resulting information service. The challenge facing obfuscation systems is to offer useful spatial information services based on imperfect location information. Obfuscation systems complement existing approaches to location privacy because they provide more flexible, user-customizable, and explicitly spatial tools for protecting location privacy, but must exist within the context of broader location-privacy protection frameworks, like legislation and regulation. |
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Matt Duckham
Dr Matt Duckham Senior Lecturer in GIScience Department of Geomatics School of Engineering University of Melbourne |