Location Privacy in Android

 Mobile Devices, there are many services that access our location, and go through virtualization technologies to discuss and application that provides our location. 74% of smartphone users utilize location-based services, and there are people aware of location privacy settings on their smartphones and disable them.

The location access requires permissions.

//City Level

<uses-permission android:name = "android.permission.ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION"/>

//Gives you whatever permission that you want.

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION"/>

This yields in an energy vs. utility and privacy vs. utility trade-off. 

Priority_high_accuracy -> point-level

Priority_no_power -> Whatever is there

Priority_low_power -> city-level

Priority-balanced_power_accuracy -> block accuracy

Location Access Interval:

setFastestInterval(long) ->(if available, why not?)

setInterval(long) -> Minimal requirement

Cities use cellular towers

Weather App -

Permission: Coarse

Interval: Every few hours

Priority: Low

Yelp: 

Permission: Fine

Interval: Foreground

Priority: Balanced

Google Maps: 

Permission: Fine

Interval: 1 second

Priority: High

We need to find the balance between energy and privacy/utility.

Infortunatly we can look at a location trace in order to find the identity of someone.

Forget about the GPS error straight lines and we are interested in specific points of interest. We have a location and then time next to it. 

We have easily identified the home location and work location, and perform reverse Geocoding and it would give us an address, a home address. 60% of the location is based mainly on the home-work location pair.

This makes a database of a specific location, with specific demographics. The amount of information that people have is absolutely frightening.

Google Location history is another example of location between certain years

There is installing time permissions, per-app location tracking, and background location tracking.

A good location is to add noise to all of the locations of the apps, to add fake location to preserve some theoretical privacy notions.