Anonymous and Privacy-Sensitive Collection of Sensed Data in Location-Based Applications
James Fogarty, Pedram Keyani, Karen Tang, and Jason Hong
Workshop on Mobile Social Software, in ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)
January 2006
Existing approaches to privacy in location-based applications generally treat people as the entity of interest. Anonymity and privacy are then addressed through a fidelity tradeoff, obscuring either a person’s identify or location. But the intentional obfuscation of location can interfere with many potential applications. This position paper discusses hitchhiking, our new that treats locations as the entity of interest. Taking this new perspective allows applications that preserve personal privacy and anonymity while collecting sensed data from people who visit locations of interest.
