Location Privacy in Geospatial Decision-Making

Geospatial data-sets are becoming commonplace in many application domains, especially in the area of decision-making. Current state-of-the-art in geospatial systems either lack the ease-of-use and efficiency or sophisticated querying and analysis features needed by these applications. To address these shortcomings, we have been working on a generic and scalable geospatial decision making system dubbed GeoDec. In this paper, we first discuss many of the new features of GeoDec, particularly its spatial querying utilities. Next, we argue that in some applications, a user of GeoDec may not want to reveal the location of the query and/or its result set to the GeoDec server to preserve his/her privacy. Hence, for GeoDec to remain applicable in these scenarios, it should be able to evaluate the spatial queries without knowing the locations of the query and/or results. Towards this end, we present our novel space-encoding approach which would enable the GeoDec server to evaluate the spatial queries blindly.