Cover Locations: Availing Location-Based Services Without Revealing the Location

Location-Based Services (LBSs) have been gaining popularity due to a wide range of interesting and important applications being developed. However, the users availing such services are concerned about their location privacy, in that they are forced to reveal their sensitive location information to untrusted third-parties. In this paper, the authors propose a new privacy-preserving approach, Cover Locations, which allows a user to access LBS without revealing his/her actual location. Based on its current location, the user's device queries for a few specifically chosen surrounding locations and constructs the results corresponding to its location from the results obtained for each queried location.