Constructive Research Study of Location-Proximity Privacy-Preserving Algorithm Capabilities as Part of a Mobile Application

Abstract: Location Based Services (LBS) have been responsible for several privacy breaches of their users in recent years and a number of researchers have put forward solutions towards making LBS more secure in regards to user location privacy. However, the proposed protocols were rarely tested in real conditions. This research study will create an artifact, an Android application that implements one of the state-of-the-art protocols for location privacy preservation, and test its performance to determine if the state of the protocols is at a stage where it can be implemented in real world applications. We have found that the performance of our artifact in short distances is comparable to real applications as it took 5 seconds to check proximity between users in 25 meter radius. However, the computation time increases drastically with increase in radius values and the protocol took 72 seconds to check proximity for 100 meter radius. Such time frames are insufficient as we believe most users are not willing to wait so long for an application to process their requests. Therefore we were unable to show that the state-of-the-art location privacy-preserving algorithms are ready for adaptation in real world applications, although certain modifications to coordinate precision could correct that.