Providing location privacy in assisted living environments

ABSTRACT

While pervasive technology becomes more widely used in assisted living environments, it becomes more important to preserve the privacy of patients being monitored. Location data of patients can be collected through sensors for behavior patterns analysis, and they can also be shared among researchers for further research for early disease diagnosis. However, sharing location information also introduces privacy concerns. A series of consecutive location samples can be considered as a trajectory of a single person, and this may leak private information if obtained by malicious users. In this paper, this problem is discussed and a location randomization algorithm is proposed to protect users' location privacy. We defined privacy metrics according to location privacy and proposed a method using dynamic mix zones to confound trajectories of two or more persons.

REFERENCES

• 1: L. Ackerman, J. Kempf, and T. Miki. Wireless location privacy: A report on law and policy in the united states, the europrean union, and japan. DoCoMo USA Labs Technical Report DCL-TR2003-001, 2003.
• 2: Alastair R. Beresford , Frank Stajano, Location Privacy in Pervasive Computing, IEEE Pervasive Computing, v.2 n.1, p.46-55, January 2003 [doi>10.1109/MPRV.2003.1186725]
• 3: Alastair R. Beresford , Frank Stajano, Mix Zones: User Privacy in Location-aware Services, Proceedings of the Second IEEE Annual Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops, p.127, March 14-17, 2004
• 4: Hervé Brönnimann , Michael T. Goodrich, Almost optimal set covers in finite VC-dimension: (preliminary version), Proceedings of the tenth annual symposium on Computational geometry, p.293-302, June 06-08, 1994, Stony Brook, New York, United States [doi>10.1145/177424.178029]
• 5: J. Durbin and S. J. Koopman. Time Series Analysis by State Space Methods. Oxford University Press Inc., New York, 2001.
• 6: R. J. Fowler, M. S. Paterson, and S. L. Tanimoto. Optimal packing and covering in the plane are NP-complete. Information Processing Letters, 12(3):133--137, June 1981.
• 7: Massimo Franceschetti , Matthew Cook , Jehoshua Bruck, A Geometric Theorem for Network Design, IEEE Transactions on Computers, v.53 n.4, p.483-489, April 2004 [doi>10.1109/TC.2004.1268406]
• 8: T. Gonzales. Covering a set of points in multidimensional space. Information Processing Letters, 40(4):181--188, 1991.
• 9: Marco Gruteser , Dirk Grunwald, Anonymous Usage of Location-Based Services Through Spatial and Temporal Cloaking, Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Mobile systems, applications and services, p.31-42, May 05-08, 2003, San Francisco, California [doi>10.1145/1066116.1189037]
• 10: Marco Gruteser , Graham Schelle , Ashish Jain , Rick Han , Dirk Grunwald, Privacy-aware location sensor networks, Proceedings of the 9th conference on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, p.28-28, May 18-21, 2003, Lihue, Hawaii
• 11: C. A. Gunter, M. J. May, and S. Stubblebine. A formal privacy system and its application to location based services. In Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET), 2004.
• 12: Dorit S. Hochbaum , Wolfgang Maass, Approximation schemes for covering and packing problems in image processing and VLSI, Journal of the ACM (JACM), v.32 n.1, p.130-136, Jan. 1985 [doi>10.1145/2455.214106]
• 13: Baik Hoh , Marco Gruteser, Protecting Location Privacy Through Path Confusion, Proceedings of the First International Conference on Security and Privacy for Emerging Areas in Communications Networks, p.194-205, September 05-09, 2005 [doi>10.1109/SECURECOMM.2005.33]
• 14: Bill Schilit , Jason Hong , Marco Gruteser, Wireless Location Privacy Protection, Computer, v.36 n.12, p.135-137, December 2003 [doi>10.1109/MC.2003.1250896]
• 15: Einar Snekkenes, Concepts for personal location privacy policies, Proceedings of the 3rd ACM conference on Electronic Commerce, p.48-57, October 14-17, 2001, Tampa, Florida, USA [doi>10.1145/501158.501164]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS

Keywords:
algorithms, location privacy, sensor networks