To protect users' private locations in location-based services, various location anonymization techniques have been proposed. The most commonly used technique is spatial cloaking, which organizes users' exact locations into cloaked regions (CRs). This satisfies the K-anonymity requirement; that is, the querier is not distinguishable among K users within the CR. However, the practicality of cloaking techniques is limited due to the lack of privacy-preserving query processing capacity, for example, providing answers to the user's spatial queries based on knowledge of the user's cloaked location rather than the exact location. This paper proposes a cloaking system model called anonymity of motion vectors (AMV) that provides anonymity for spatial queries. The proposed AMV minimizes the CR of a mobile user using motion vectors. In addition, the AMV creates a ranged search area that includes the nearest neighbor (NN) objects to the querier who issued a CR-based query. The effectiveness of the proposed AMV is demonstrated in simulated experiments.

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To receive location-based services (LBS), users must disclose their locations and queries to the LBS server, which can expose the user's identity, location, and other information. Recently, techniques for protecting user privacy using dummies have been researched. However, many factors, such as the distance between the obstacles and the dummies, must be considered in order to create dummies. Therefore, this study proposes an efficient dummy creation technique to improve user privacy protection. Experimental results show that the proposed technique improves on other recent techniques.

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K-anonymization generated a cloaked region (CR) that was K-anonymous; that is, the query issuer was indistinguishable from K-1 other users (nearest neighbors) within the CR. This reduced the probability of the query issuer’s location being exposed to untrusted parties (1/K). However, location cloaking is vulnerable to query tracking attacks, wherein the adversary can infer the query issuer by comparing the two regions in continuous LBS queries. This paper proposes a novel location cloaking method to resist this attack. The target systems of the proposed method are road networks where the mobile clients’ trajectories are fixed (the road network is preknown and fixed, instead of the trajectories), such as subways, railways, and highways. The proposed method, called adaptive-fixed K-anonymization (A-KF), takes this issue into account and generates smaller CRs without compromising the privacy of the query issuer’s location. Our results show that the proposed A-KF method outperforms previous location cloaking methods.