A novel approach of privacy protection of mobile users while using location-based services applications

The necessity of protecting mobile users' privacy when using location-based services (LBS) is highlighted in recent study, and location cloaking is one of the solutions offered. Location cloaking makes an effort to safeguard users' location privacy by introducing uncertainty while finding out the users’ location-context. The existing location cloaking algorithms are cautious about quality of the query service metrics (QoS), which mainly include success rate, anonymity level and spatial resolution. However, performance metric that is time to generate the cloaked regions should be improved. This was particularly important when user density is high. This work provides an efficient location cloaking scheme where a clique based cloaked region is constructed via partitioning of user-graph using graph partitioning algorithm, thereby generates reasonably-sized cloaked regions in less time. Further, to optimize cloaked region generation, multi-depth partitioning algorithm called BLH (Balanced Location Hiding) is proposed. Through concurrent and optimal generations of cloaked regions the proposed location cloaking preserves users' location privacy to a higher extent while retaining both the QoS and performance criteria. Experimental findings demonstrate that the success rate of the proposed algorithms is significantly increased. Even with a higher user density, it is approximately 98% with quicker response time.