Search Me If You Can: Privacy-preserving Location Query Service

Abstract

Location-Based Service (LBS) becomes increasingly popular with the dramatic growth of smart phones and
social network services (SNS), and its context-rich functionalities attract considerable users. Many LBS providers use
users’ location information to offer them convenience and useful functions. However, the LBS could greatly breach
personal privacy because location itself contains much information. Hence, preserving location privacy while achieving
utility from it is still an challeng- ing question now. This paper tackles this non-trivial challenge by designing a suite of
novel fine-grained Privacy-preserving Location Query Protocol (PLQP). Our protocol allows different levels of location
query on encrypted location information for different users, and it is efficient enough to be applied in mobile platforms.