An Exploration to Location Based Service and Its Privacy Preserving Techniques: A Survey

Mobile gadgets today are swaggering computing potential and memory at par or at times even higher to that found in desktop personal computers. A wireless interconnection has turned out to be considerably more readily accessible these days. As individuals are growing mobile with regard to the fast lifestyle and working pattern, a new, smarter system came into existence that is termed as 'Location Based Service' (LBS). Such a system amalgamates the location data of a user with smart applications to deliver demanded services. Although LBS provide major openings for a large variety of markets and remarkable convenience to the end user, it also presents subtle privacy attack to user's location information. Threat to the privacy sneaks into the system due to the prerequisite of sending user's current location to the LBS provider to attain related services. Since the volume of data gathered from dynamic or stationary mobile users using LBS can be high, it is vital to outline the frameworks and systems in a manner that is secure and keep the location information private. In this paper, we perform an exploratory survey about the various techniques that have been suggested by many researchers based on centralized and distributed approaches, to preserve location privacy of the user. A large portion of these techniques has a trade-off between privacy, efficiency, applicability and quality of service. This paper details and analyses the various existing techniques for preserving location privacy of the participating user in LBS.