A Distributed Spatial Cloaking Protocol for Location Privacy

In order to protect users' location privacy for Location-based Service (LBS), this paper proposes a spatial cloaking protocol satisfied k-anonymity, to generate a cloak area and guarantee users' privacy. Firstly, it analyzes the present solutions for privacy protection. Then, a distributed model is presented in this paper, which does not rely on the intermediate anonymizer. Furthermore, it elaborates the process of spatial cloaking for location privacy by introducing a communication chain, which updating the current minimum cloak area that covers k users. Finally, it discusses the robustness in two risk scenarios, and demonstrates the spatial cloaking protocol performs better than former method.