Relative and cardinal directions for privacy-aware personal navigation services: A comparison towards navigation efficiency

Traditionally, individual location has been difficult to utilize, due to a lack of precise positioning technologies. Now, with location-aware technologies integrated into lightweight mobile devices such as sensor nodes, location-based services are becoming a phenomenon in mobile services. These nodes, however, can potentially reveal sensitive and private information about individuals. In most location-aware applications such as personal navigations, location privacy is an issue. In this paper, new finding about generating efficient navigation instruction for imprecise location known as imprecise navigation is discussed. An algorithm called privacy-aware personal navigation algorithm is introduced and two types of navigational directions (relative and cardinal direction) are used for comparison. The efficiency of the algorithms has been analyzed based on its navigational performance and privacy protection. Hence, this research has the potential to support both protecting location privacy and generating better navigational instruction for imprecise navigation.