Privacy Protection Through k-anonymity in Location-based Services

The advent of Location-based Services (LBS), especially in wireless communications systems, has raised a growing concern for user about his privacy. As for every location-based query, the user has to reveal his location coordinates (through technologies like Global Positioning Systems); if this information could be revealed to anybody, it becomes a privacy breach. To take care of these issues, several techniques have come up among which k-anonymity has been most widely used and studied in different forms and different contexts. In this paper, we have reviewed the application of k-anonymity for LBS and its recent advancements. While doing so, we have recognized three perspectives for the applicability of k-anonymity for LBS: the application of k-anonymity based on the architecture, based on the algorithms for anonymization, and based on the types of k-anonymity (according to the different query processing techniques). Hence, the review has been done within the framework of these perspectives. These -perspectives have covered almost all the aspects of the works which have been reviewed in this paper. This review can arm the privacy providers with the latest techniques and possible modifications in their present techniques.