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Special issue on privacy aware and location-based mobile services

Location-aware computing provides the ability to continuously monitor, communicate, and process information about an individual’s location with a high degree of spatial and temporal precision and accuracy. The benefits to individuals and society of location-based services (LBS), which rely on location-aware computing, are potentially enormous. An ever-broadening range of LBS applications, from personal navigation to emergency response, m-commerce to elder care, are being proposed, developed, and deployed. Although LBS remains a relatively small market today (estimated US$200 million worldwide market for wireless LBS in 2007), recent industry trends seem to indicate that LBS are at last transitioning into a mature technology (as evidenced by Nokia’s stated objective of ubiquitous GPS-enabled phones and recent US$8 billion acquisition of Navteq). Many researchers in the area of LBS, however, argue that location-privacy jeopardises all that. Our precise location uniquely identifies us, potentially more so than our name, address, or even our genetic profile. Failure to protect a user’s location privacy has been associated with undesirable consequences in at least three distinct areas (Clarke 1999, Kaasinen 2003, Duckham and Kulik 2006, Raper et al. 2007). First, unscrupulous businesses may bombard a person with unsolicited marketing for products or services related to that person’s location (termed location-based ‘‘spam’’). Many of us may already be somewhat familiar with this phenomenon, for example with bluecasting (unsolicited proximity-based advertisements beamed to Bluetooth-enabled mobile devices) becoming increasingly common in bars, near billboards, and in other public spaces. Second, location is inextricably linked to personal well-being and safety. Failing to protect location privacy can potentially result in harmful activities, such as stalking or assault. Third, knowledge about location can be used to infer other personal information about an individual, such as a person’s political views, state of health, or personal preferences. Breaches of location privacy are already beginning to result in lengthy and complex legal cases (for example, in the US (Chicago Tribune 2001) and Korea (Lee 2005)) and are arguably a barrier to the development of new and critical location-based services (Muntz et al. 2003). For LBS, location privacy is the ‘‘elephant in the room’’. Against this background, interest and research into location privacy has been growing rapidly over the past five years. In an attempt to capture some of this growing interest in the topic, the First International Workshop on Privacy-Aware Location-based Mobile Services (PALMS 2007) was held in conjunction with the 8th International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM 2007) in Mannheim, Germany, May 11, 2007. The workshop included presentations of 11 fully peer-reviewed short papers, as well as a keynote from Alistair Beresford, University of Cambridge, UK. The authors of accepted papers, published in IEEE MDM 2007 proceedings (Mokbel et al. 2006), include leading