Privacy and Security Challenges in Location Aware Computing

Book excerpt: Location-aware computing is a technology that uses the location (provides granular geographical information) of people and objects to derive contextual information. Today, one can obtain this location information free of cost through smartphones. Smartphones with location enabled applications have revolutionized the ways in which people perform their activities and get benefits from the automated services. It especially helps to get details of services in less time; wherever the user may be and whenever they want. The need for smartphones and location enabled applications has been growing year after year. Nowadays no one can leave without their phone; the phone seemingly becomes one of the parts of the human body. The individual can now be predicted by their phone and the identity of the phone becomes the person’s identity. Though there is a tremendous need for location-enabled applications with smartphones, the debate on privacy and security related to location data has also been growing. Privacy and Security Challenges in Location Aware Computing provides the latest research on privacy enhanced location-based applications development and exposes the necessity of location privacy preservation, as well as issues and challenges related to protecting the location data. It also suggests solutions for enhancing the protection of location privacy and therefore users’ privacy as well. The chapters highlight important topic areas such as video surveillance in human tracking/detection, geographical information system design, cyberspace attacks and warfare, and location aware security systems. The culmination of these topics creates a book that is ideal for security analysts, mobile application developers, practitioners, academicians, students, and researchers.