An Effective Privacy-Preserving and Enhanced Dummy Location Scheme for Semi-trusted Third Parties

Location-Based Services (LBS) have garnered significant attention in recent years, emphasizing the need to improve location services while safeguarding user privacy. In this paper, we propose an effective privacy-preserving and enhanced dummy location scheme specifically designed for semi-trusted third-party scenarios, with a primary focus on defending against inference attacks targeting a user’s private location information. To achieve more effective location privacy preservation and mitigate privacy leaks stemming from a single point of failure, we employ a key information sharing mechanism, introduce a robust dummy location set generation approach, and present a comprehensive covering area construction strategy. To demonstrate the viability and effectiveness of our proposed scheme, we conduct a thorough simulation evaluation and performance analysis based on a practical road network setting.