ABSTRACT
236With the increased mobility in our modern life, location-based services (LBS) such as mobile commerce, mobile health, and location-based social networking have become essential for business, healthcare, entertainment, and even day-to-day living. At the same time, the security and privacy of LBS have become major concerns and roadblocks toward achieving the full potential of location-based applications. The location information carries the footprints of our activities, heralding our presence and absence in spatial and temporal contexts. As a result, location information needs to be protected from unauthorized parties while guaranteeing access at the appropriate granularity level by bona fide location-based service providers in order for users to receive desired location-based services. On the otherhand, resources and services of LBS providers need to be provisioned based on the location of the LBS user. In this chapter, we present the ecosystem of location information within an LBS including major entities involved, granularities, and types of location information. We then present security and privacy issues and threats that can emerge in LBSs and discuss various approaches that have been proposed to address these security and privacy concerns, including anonymization, location obfuscation, and access control and location authentication techniques. We conclude this chapter with a discussion about the research directions.
