Marco Cremonini

Assistant Professor Department of Information Technology, University of Milan

The pervasive diffusion of mobile communication devices and the technical improvements of location technologies are fostering the development of new applications that use the physical position of users to offer location-based services for business, social, or informational purposes. In such a context, privacy concerns are increasing and call for sophisticated solutions able to guarantee different levels of location privacy to the users.

Cross-organizational issues arise striking a balance between privacy preferences required by users and location accuracy needed by the providers of online services. In this scenario different players must cooperate: service providers, users and location providers that manage location information and mediate between users and service providers.

To this end, two key requirements that must be satisfied are: the availability of techniques providing for different degrees of location privacy and the possibility of negotiating such privacy degrees. This way, location information can be adjusted to comply with both user preferences and service providers accuracy requirements.