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Section: Software and Platforms
Location Guard
Participants : Konstantinos Chatzikokolakis [correspondant] , Marco Stronati.
The purpose of Location Guard is to implement obfuscation techniques for achieving location privacy, in a an easy and intuitive way that makes them available to the general public. Various modern applications, running either on smartphones or on the web, allow third parties to obtain the user's location. A smartphone application can obtain this information from the operating system using a system call, while web application obtain it from the browser using a javascript call.
Although both mobile operating systems and browsers require the user's permission to disclose location information, the user faces an “all-or-nothing” choice: either disclose his exact location and give up his privacy, or stop using the application. This forces many users to disclose their location, although ideally they would like to enjoy some privacy.
The API level of a browser or an operating system would be an ideal place for integrating a location obfuscation technique, in a way that is easy to understand for the average user, and readily available to all applications. When an application asks for the user's location, the browser or operating system can ask the user's permission, but including the option to provide an obfuscated location instead of the real one! Different levels of obfuscation can be also offered, so that the user can chose to provide more accurate location to applications that really need it, and more noisy location to those that don't.
A prototype of Location Guard has been already implemented for Google Chrome. In the future we plan to extend it to other desktop and mobile browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc), as well as to implement it in modern mobile operating systems, primarily on Android.