Enhancing Customer Privacy for Commercial Continuous Location-Based Services

The likelihood of consumers to use commercial location-based services significantly depends on their perception of privacy protection by the service provider. In this paper we discuss existing privacy-enhancing architectures for LBS and argue that they are either not applicable or insufficient for services requiring continuous location queries. In order to offer such services providers often prefer to refrain from storing fine-grained location information of their customers. Instead some form of data aggregation on the mobile device is used and only aggregated information is released to the service provider upon approval of the customer. This leads to a rather loose integration of the mobile device into the backend process. We explain our concept for such an enhanced architecture and discuss some implementation aspects. The work has been motivated by a specific application scenario in an insurance context for which we are currently developing a prototype.