Addressing privacy issues in location-based collaborative and distributed environments

In the past few years collaborative environments have been growing fast thanks to the ubiquitousness of smartphones and to their rich features. These devices are nowadays very sophisticated by being able to receive GPS signal, communicate with other devices through mobile network, and to analyze several different kinds of data received with their sensors. In some collaborative environments, users need to access the correct geo-location, for example when they collaboratively contribute to build a collection of data about specific objects, such as for traffic news. On other hand, sharing the exact location may imply violations to the user privacy. In this paper we discuss the importance of the correct location in collaborative environments and we address the problem of privacy for users and show how current solutions, which aim to preserve the user privacy, can interfere with the correct behavior of some applications. We also propose a novel approach to provide the correct location to the collaborative network only when this is needed, which preserves the user privacy. © 2014 IEEE.