Privacy in Indoor Positioning Systems: a survey

This work aims at providing a quick overview of privacy mechanisms employed in indoor positioning systems. It is the first work in of several planned works concerning urban mobility and location privacy. Some of the issues include privacy and usefulness trade-offs, using wearables for mobility data, and combining indoor and outdoor localization.

The first author, Sylvia Holcer, is an Early Stage Researcher in the A-WEAR program funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 (H2020) Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Networks. As part of the program she is also a doctorate student at the University of Jaume I in Castellón and the Brno University of Technology.

The abstract is:

Abstract: This article proposes a systematic review of privacy in indoor positioning systems. The selected 41 articles on location privacy preserving mechanisms employ non-inherently private methods such as encryption, k-anonymity, and differential privacy. The 15 identified mechanisms are categorized and summarized by where they are processed: on device, during transmission, or at a server. Trade-offs such as calculation speed, granularity, or complexity in set-up are identified for each mechanism. In 40% of the papers, some trade-offs are minimized by combining several methods into a hybrid solution. The combinations of mechanisms and their levels of offered privacy are suggested based on estimated user mobility cases.

Cite it as

S. Holcer, J. Torres-Sospedra, M. Gould and I. Remolar, “Privacy in Indoor Positioning Systems: A Systematic Review,” 2020 International Conference on Localization and GNSS (ICL-GNSS), Tampere, Finland, 2020, pp. 1-6. doi: 10.1109/ICL-GNSS49876.2020.9115496