This book provides a comprehensive study of the state of the art in location privacy for mobile applications. It presents an integrated five-part framework for location privacy research, which includes the analysis of location privacy definitions, attacks and adversaries, location privacy protection methods, location privacy metrics, and location-based mobile applications. In addition, it analyses the relationships between the various elements of location privacy, and elaborates on real-world attacks in a specific application. Furthermore, the book features case studies of three applications and shares valuable insights into future research directions. Shedding new light on key research issues in location privacy and promoting the advance and development of future location-based mobile applications, it will be of interest to a broad readership, from students to researchers and engineers in the field.

Location-aware computing is a technology that uses the location (provides granular geographical information) of people and objects to derive contextual information. Today, one can obtain this location information free of cost through smartphones. Smartphones with location enabled applications have revolutionized the ways in which people perform their activities and get benefits from the automated services. It especially helps to get details of services in less time; wherever the user may be and whenever they want. The need for smartphones and location enabled applications has been growing year after year. Nowadays no one can leave without their phone; the phone seemingly becomes one of the parts of the human body. The individual can now be predicted by their phone and the identity of the phone becomes the person’s identity. Though there is a tremendous need for location-enabled applications with smartphones, the debate on privacy and security related to location data has also been growing. Privacy and Security Challenges in Location Aware Computing provides the latest research on privacy enhanced location-based applications development and exposes the necessity of location privacy preservation, as well as issues and challenges related to protecting the location data. It also suggests solutions for enhancing the protection of location privacy and therefore users’ privacy as well. The chapters highlight important topic areas such as video surveillance in human tracking/detection, geographical information system design, cyberspace attacks and warfare, and location aware security systems. The culmination of these topics creates a book that is ideal for security analysts, mobile application developers, practitioners, academicians, students, and researchers.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, PET 2006, held in Cambridge, UK, in June 2006 co-located with WEIS 2006, the Workshop on the Economics of Information Security, and WOTE 2006, the IAVoSS Workshop On Trustworthy Elections. The 24 revised full papers present novel research on all theoretical and practical aspects of privacy technologies.

This SpringerBrief analyzes the potential privacy threats in wireless and mobile network environments, and reviews some existing works. It proposes multiple privacy preserving techniques against several types of privacy threats that are targeting users in a mobile network environment. Depending on the network architecture, different approaches can be adopted. The first proposed approach considers a three-party system architecture where there is a trusted central authority that can be used to protect users’ privacy. The second approach considers a totally distributed environment where users perform privacy protection by themselves. Finally, more general system architecture is discussed including how a semi-trusted server may exist, but users need to collaborate to achieve maximized privacy protection. This brief is designed for researchers and professionals working with privacy preservation, mobile networks, and threat models. The variety of approaches presented makes it useful for students as well.

Location-based applications refer to those that use location data in a prominent manner. Location data can be very effective for service provisioning, enabling the birth of a new generation of information services. Although data security and privacy issues have been extensively investigated in several domains, current techniques are not readily applicable to location-based applications. Conciliating the effectiveness of these applications with privacy concerns constitutes a unique challenge, mostly due to the semantic richness of location and time information. Research in this field involves aspects of spatio-temporal reasoning, query processing, system security, statistical inference, and more importantly, anonymization techniques. Several research groups have been working in recent years to identify privacy attacks and defense techniques in this domain. This state-of-the-art survey provides a solid ground for researchers approaching this topic to understand current achievements through a common categorization of privacy threats and defense techniques. This objective is particularly challenging considering the specific (and often implicit) assumptions that characterize the recent literature on privacy in location-based services. The book also illustrates the many facets that make the study of this topic a particularly interesting research subject, including topics that go beyond privacy preserving transformations of service requests, and include access control, privacy preserving publishing of moving object data, privacy in the use of specific positioning technology, and privacy in vehicular network applications.

This work aims at understanding behavior around location information, including why users share such information, why they protect the data, and what kind of other factors influence the decision to behave in a certain way. This book explores privacy in the context of location data, and answers questions such as what are the privacy related behaviors in this context, and what are the factors influencing such behaviors. The book gives an overview to what privacy means for users in terms of understandings, attitudes and valuations. This book discusses reasons for why research around this topic is challenging, and presents various methods for diving into the topic through empirical studies. The work is relevant for professionals, researchers, and users of technology.

Health and fitness apps collect various personal information including name, email address, age, height, weight, and in some cases, detailed health information. When using these apps, many users trustfully log everything from diet to sleep patterns. However, by sharing such personal information, end-users may make themselves targets to misuse of this information by unknown third parties, such as insurance companies. Despite the important role of informed consent in the creation of health and fitness applications, the intersection of ethics and information sharing is understudied and is an often-ignored topic during the creation of mobile applications. Privacy Concerns Surrounding Personal Information Sharing on Health and Fitness Mobile Apps is a key reference source that provides research on the dangers of sharing personal information on health and wellness apps, as well as how such information can be used by employers, insurance companies, advertisers, and other third parties. While highlighting topics such as data ethics, privacy management, and information sharing, this publication explores the intersection of ethics and privacy using various quantitative, qualitative, and critical analytic approaches. It is ideally designed for policymakers, software developers, mobile app designers, legal specialists, privacy analysts, data scientists, researchers, academicians, and upper-level students.