Privacy protection for Wi-Fi location positioning systems

With the democratization of mobile devices embedding different positioning capabilities, location information is used for a variety of applications. On mobile devices, the geolocation can be obtained via GPS or by leveraging surrounding network infrastructure such as Wi-Fi access points. Despite a lower accuracy, Wi-Fi based geolocation has several advantages over GPS such as reduced energy consumption and availability in indoor and availability in indoor environments. To enable this network-based geolocation, mobile devices need to interact with a location positioning system that will resolve a list of visible Wi-Fi access points into a position. By doing so, mobile users are revealing their mobility to the location provider, potentially exposing sensitive information to an untrusted third-party.