GPS Privacy: Enabling Proximity-based Services while Keeping GPS Locations Private

Athindran Ramesh Kumar, Liang Heng, Grace X. Gao

Abstract:	Location-based services have revolutionized people’s everyday lives. Proximity-based services in particular, are commonly used to identify nearby friends and other land-marks. However, these services endanger the privacy of users as the location information is provided to the service provider. In this work, we propose a privacy protection scheme which leverages the low-level data used in GPS location estimation for privacy protection. The anonymous range vector of a user to visible satellites is instead provided to the service provider. The exact location of the user cannot be inferred from the anonymous range vector. An efficient algorithm for proximity detection using the anonymous range vector is presented. A proof of concept of the proximity detection scheme is illustrated using experiments withu-bloxLEA-6T receivers and Android phones.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 27th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2014) September 8 - 12, 2014 Tampa Convention Center Tampa, Florida
Pages:	539 - 547
Cite this article:	Kumar, Athindran Ramesh, Heng, Liang, Gao, Grace X., "GPS Privacy: Enabling Proximity-based Services while Keeping GPS Locations Private," Proceedings of the 27th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2014), Tampa, Florida, September 2014, pp. 539-547.
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