short-paper

Unraveling an old cloak: k-anonymity for location privacy

Authors:

Carmela Troncoso,

Julien Freudiger,

Jean-Pierre HubauxAuthors Info & Claims

WPES '10: Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM workshop on Privacy in the electronic society

Pages 115 - 118

https://doi.org/10.1145/1866919.1866936

Published: 04 October 2010 Publication History

Abstract

There is a rich collection of literature that aims at protecting the privacy of users querying location-based services. One of the most popular location privacy techniques consists in cloaking users' locations such that k users appear as potential senders of a query, thus achieving k-anonymity. This paper analyzes the effectiveness of k-anonymity approaches for protecting location privacy in the presence of various types of adversaries. The unraveling of the scheme unfolds the inconsistency between its components, mainly the cloaking mechanism and the k-anonymity metric. We show that constructing cloaking regions based on the users' locations does not reliably relate to location privacy, and argue that this technique may even be detrimental to users' location privacy. The uncovered flaws imply that existing k-anonymity scheme is a tattered cloak for protecting location privacy.

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Cited By

Erdemir EDragotti PGündüz D(2023)Active Privacy-Utility Trade-Off Against Inference in Time-Series Data SharingIEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Information Theory10.1109/JSAIT.2023.32879294(159-173)Online publication date: 2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/JSAIT.2023.3287929
Wiedemann NMartin HSuel EHong YXin Y(2023)Influence of tracking duration on the privacy of individual mobility graphsJournal of Location Based Services10.1080/17489725.2023.223919017:4(370-388)Online publication date: 27-Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1080/17489725.2023.2239190
Van de Vyvere BColpaert P(2022)Using ANPR data to create an anonymized linked open dataset on urban bustleEuropean Transport Research Review10.1186/s12544-022-00538-114:1Online publication date: 24-Apr-2022
https://doi.org/10.1186/s12544-022-00538-1
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Index Terms

Unraveling an old cloak: k-anonymity for location privacy
1. Security and privacy
  1. Human and societal aspects of security and privacy
2. Social and professional topics
  1. Computing / technology policy
    1. Privacy policies

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

WPES '10: Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM workshop on Privacy in the electronic society

October 2010

136 pages

ISBN:9781450300964

DOI:10.1145/1866919

General Chair:
Ehab Al-Shaer
University of North Carolina, Charlotte, USA
,
Program Chair:
Keith Frikken
Miami University, USA

Copyright © 2010 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGSAC: ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit, and Control

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Published: 04 October 2010

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CCS '10

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CCS '10: 17th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security 2010

October 4, 2010

Illinois, Chicago, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 106 of 355 submissions, 30%

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Cited By

Erdemir EDragotti PGündüz D(2023)Active Privacy-Utility Trade-Off Against Inference in Time-Series Data SharingIEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Information Theory10.1109/JSAIT.2023.32879294(159-173)Online publication date: 2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/JSAIT.2023.3287929
Wiedemann NMartin HSuel EHong YXin Y(2023)Influence of tracking duration on the privacy of individual mobility graphsJournal of Location Based Services10.1080/17489725.2023.223919017:4(370-388)Online publication date: 27-Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1080/17489725.2023.2239190
Van de Vyvere BColpaert P(2022)Using ANPR data to create an anonymized linked open dataset on urban bustleEuropean Transport Research Review10.1186/s12544-022-00538-114:1Online publication date: 24-Apr-2022
https://doi.org/10.1186/s12544-022-00538-1
Wu JChen XZhang LZhou SWang D(2022)A Multi-Secret Reputation Adjustment Method in the Secret Sharing for Internet of VehiclesSecurity and Communication Networks10.1155/2022/14139762022Online publication date: 1-Jan-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1155/2022/1413976
Shenoy JLiu ZTao BKabelac ZVasisht DKuipers FOrda A(2022)RF-protectProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference10.1145/3544216.3544256(588-600)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544216.3544256
Ye FEl Rouayheb S(2022)Intermittent Private Information Retrieval With Application to Location PrivacyIEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications10.1109/JSAC.2022.314230140:3(927-939)Online publication date: Mar-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/JSAC.2022.3142301
Ramtohul AKhedo K(2022)PISA: A proximity-based social networking (PBSN) protection modelSecurity Journal10.1057/s41284-022-00334-536:1(165-200)Online publication date: 28-Mar-2022
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41284-022-00334-5
Bennati SKovacevic A(2022)Modelling imperfect knowledge via location semantics for realistic privacy risks estimation in trajectory dataScientific Reports10.1038/s41598-021-03762-212:1Online publication date: 7-Jan-2022
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-03762-2
Alkady YRizk R(2022)Location Privacy-Preserving of Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network in Smart CitiesThe 8th International Conference on Advanced Machine Learning and Technologies and Applications (AMLTA2022)10.1007/978-3-031-03918-8_44(532-543)Online publication date: 17-Apr-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03918-8_44
Yamin MSen A(2021)Improving Privacy and Security of User Data in Location Based ServicesResearch Anthology on Privatizing and Securing Data10.4018/978-1-7998-8954-0.ch067(1411-1437)Online publication date: 2021
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