# Toward Addressing Location Privacy Issues: New Affiliations with Social and Location Attributes
## 3 Results
### Identifying User's Identity--Privacy Threats in Geolocation Apps/Services
The authors suggest that obfuscation degrades a user's location information to protect users' privacy in pervasive computer environments as a method of balancing the amount of information required by the service in order to provide the best results and the amount of information that the user is willing to disclose. In other words, as the authors claim, \"the aim of this approach is to use only just enough location information to provide a location-based service: the so-called 'need to know principle' or 'principle of minimal collection'\" (p. 15). As potential negative effects can represent a considerable threat to the user, namely \"location-based \"spam\", \"personal wellbeing and safety\" or \"intrusive inferences\" (p. 3), it is important to address through a combination of both already existing methods, such as regulation, privacy policies, anonymity, and pseudonymity and obfuscation techniques. The authors define the scenario and the architecture of the obfuscation system before proceeding to the obfuscation model and algorithms. To address potential heuristic threats, the researchers first categorize and then formalize the methodology. They conclude that the methodology needs to be implemented and tested in order to cover users' personal needs. That is to say, a user's geolocation information is thought to be descriptive and sensitive enough that researchers conclude that it is vital to be protected in the same way as a user's personal information. As revealing geolocation information can be potentially descriptive of a user's identity, researchers have designed special applications to address this need. [PERSON], [PERSON], and [PERSON] [36] present \"Casper\", which is \"a new framework in which mobile and stationary users can entertain location-based services without revealing their location information\" (p. 1). Casper includes \"the location anonymizer\" and \"the privacy-aware query processor\", as its main purpose is to deal with private information while at the same time enabling the user to take advantage of the services. Cloaked spatial information neutralizes users' sensitive location information with the use of filters. Location-based services are also under active consideration in \"Reno\", which is a social location disclosure service [37]. According to [PERSON] et al., places are described either as predefined place lists or as personally defined users' labels. Reno's pilot study was carried out to a limited number of participants and for a limited period of time, while it could only be used as a mobile phone platform for a specific mobile device. The need to protect geolocation information urged researchers to focus toward this direction while employing various means. However, while a number of different techniques and methodologies were explored, it seems that there is still the need for further research to tackle potential information leaks. Therefore, taking into consideration the above studies and the categorization of the papers, we focused on addressing our research questions. Consequently, we proceeded in matching location information attributes to attributes of social identity in a way that could create new affiliations in addressing location privacy concerns and threats while designing privacy requirements.