Abstract. As Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers become a common feature in cell phones, personal digital assistants, and automobiles, there is a growing interest in tracking larger user populations, rather than individual users. Unfortunately, anonymous location samples do not fully solve the privacy problem. An adversary could link multiple samples (i.e., follow the footsteps) to accumulate path information and eventually identify a user. This paper reports on our ongoing work to analyze privacy risks in such applications. We observe that linking anonymous location samples is related to the data association problem in tracking systems. We then propose to use such tracking algorithms to characterize the level of privacy and to derive disclosure control algorithms.
Gruteser and Hoh REF propose to use tracking algorithms to characterize the level of location privacy.
On the Anonymity of Periodic Location Samples
In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Security in Pervasive Computing
Computer Science