A strategy to balance location privacy and positioning accuracy

In privacy protection methods based on location services, constructing anonymous areas using location information shared by collaborative users is the main method. However, this collaborative process not only increases the risk of mobile users’ location privacy being leaked, but also reduces positioning accuracy. In response to this problem, we propose a balancing strategy, which transforms the problem of protecting mobile users’ location privacy and improving positioning accuracy into a balance issue between location privacy and positioning accuracy. The cooperation of mobile users with different collaborating users is then modeled as an objective optimization problem, and location privacy and positioning accuracy are evaluated separately to make different selection strategies. Finally, an optimization function is constructed to select the optimal selection strategies. Experimental results show that our proposed strategy can effectively achieve the balance between location privacy and positioning accuracy.