Using Effective Dummy Locations and Routes to Conceal User Locations

Smartphones are extremely popular in these days because millions of apps are available. People use the apps for almost everything like shopping, banking, watching movies, and playing games. One set of the favorite apps is location-based services (LBSs), which provide various services like navigation and recommendations based on users’ location data. However, not all users like to share their location data with the service providers. Various methods are proposed to solve this problem. One of the methods is using dummy locations, which are sent along with the true locations to the service providers, so the providers would not know which locations are true. This method is simple and seems effective. Nevertheless, there are some loopholes from this method. There are two kinds of locations, discrete and continuous locations. This research proposes effective methods of using discrete and continuous dummy locations to conceal user locations and routes, so the service providers are not able to find the true user locations or routes. Preliminary experiment results show the proposed methods are simple, but effective.