Due to the popularity of mobile devices (e.g., cell phones, PDAs, etc.), location-based services have become more and more
prevalent in recent years. However, users have to reveal their location information to access location-based services with
existing service infrastructures. It is possible that adversaries could collect the location information, which in turn invades
user’s privacy. There are existing solutions for query processing on spatial networks and mobile user privacy protection in
Euclidean space. However there is no solution for solving queries on spatial networks with privacy protection. Therefore,
we aim to provide network distance spatial query solutions which can preserve user privacy by utilizing
K-anonymity mechanisms. In this paper, we propose an effective location cloaking mechanism based on spatial networks and two
novel query algorithms, PSNN and PSRQ, for answering nearest neighbor queries and range queries on spatial networks without
revealing private information of the query initiator. We demonstrate the appeal of our technique using extensive simulation
results.
Keywords Privacy protection - Mobile data management - Location-based services