Patent ID: 8559927

Claim:
A method for protecting location privacy by employing dummy information when using location based services, the method comprising: connecting to a location based service (LBS) provider; submitting a user's actual location and a first sub-group of dummy locations representing a maximum number of dummy locations allowed to be submitted by the user based on one or more constraints to the LBS provider, wherein the first sub-group is selected among a total group of dummy locations representing a maximum number of dummy locations allowed by the LBS provider regardless of any constraints, the one or more constraints comprising an available bandwidth, a power consumption of a computing device connecting to the LBS provider, and/or a service requirement of the LBS provider; and receiving location based service data associated with a second sub-group of dummy locations and the user's actual location from the LBS provider, wherein the second sub-group is a subset of the first sub-group and the second sub-group of dummy locations is selected using a sub-code that represents an index between the user's actual location and the second sub-group of dummy locations.