PLoS ONE (Jan 2016)

Protection of Location Privacy Based on Distributed Collaborative Recommendations.

  • Peng Wang,
  • Jing Yang,
  • Jian-Pei Zhang

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0163053
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 11, no. 9
p. e0163053

Abstract

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In the existing centralized location services system structure, the server is easily attracted and be the communication bottleneck. It caused the disclosure of users' location. For this, we presented a new distributed collaborative recommendation strategy that is based on the distributed system. In this strategy, each node establishes profiles of their own location information. When requests for location services appear, the user can obtain the corresponding location services according to the recommendation of the neighboring users' location information profiles. If no suitable recommended location service results are obtained, then the user can send a service request to the server according to the construction of a k-anonymous data set with a centroid position of the neighbors. In this strategy, we designed a new model of distributed collaborative recommendation location service based on the users' location information profiles and used generalization and encryption to ensure the safety of the user's location information privacy. Finally, we used the real location data set to make theoretical and experimental analysis. And the results show that the strategy proposed in this paper is capable of reducing the frequency of access to the location server, providing better location services and protecting better the user's location privacy.