context - aware - privacy : A system for privacy protection in location-based services
CAP is a prototypical system for privacy-protection in location-based services. It primarily perturbs a users location in a context-aware manner. Additionally, for providing communication anonymity, it is integrated with Tor - a popular tool for hiding user's IP address. CAP is a completely user-driven system, i.e., it does not require any trusted third party. CAP requires positioning infrastructure, e.g., GPS, to obtain a user's location. However for users with no such technology, CAP provides interface to geocoding services where a user's address will be translated into his geographical location (latitude and longitude).
Overview
Salient Features
- Completely user-driven : No trusted third-party required.
- Integration with Google Maps APIs.
- Interface to Yahoo geocoding services.
- Nearest point of interest search with option of tuning to desired level of privacy.
- Re-arrangement in POIs in accordance with original location .
- Integration with Tor.
CAP is developed using Visual C++ and .NET framework for Windows, and using C++, Qt and Boost library for Unix based operating systems. CAP communicates with GPS connected to serial ports via USB or Bluetooth and parses raw NMEA sentences to obtain location. The embedded google maps and positioning of markers on it is achieved using Google Map APIs and Yahoo Geocoding Services are being used.
Integration with Google Maps
Tools used
Acknowledgements
This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, and/or recommendations expressed in this material, either expressed or implied, are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsor listed above.
The users will view the results of their POI search in Google Maps. As. shown, the green and blue markers respectively show the original and the perturbed location of the user, and the red markers show POIs. We use Google Map APIs for placement of these markers in an offline mode so that the original location is not exposed to Google server at any time. CAP re-arranges the received POI list according to the user's original location. The red markers are numbered 1 to 10 indicating the order of their distance from the original location (green). A user also has an option to re-tune the privacy level. Once that is done, a new perturbed location will be generated and results will de displayed correspondingly.
