Privacy-Preserving Wireless Indoor Localization Systems

Abstract

Recently the number of buildings and interior spaces has increased, and many systems have been proposed to locate people or objects in these environments. At present, several technologies, such as GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Ultrasound, and RFID, are used for positioning problems. Some of these technologies provide good results for positioning outdoors whereas some others are effective for indoor environments. While GPS is used for outdoor localization systems, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Ultra WideBand, and RFID are used for indoor localization systems (ILSs). Today, due to the proliferation and extensive usage of Wi-Fi access points, wireless-based technologies in indoor localization are preferred more than others. However, even though the abovementioned technologies make life easier for their users, ILSs can pose some privacy risks in case the confidentiality of the location data cannot be ensured. Such an incident is highly likely to result in the disclosure of users’ identities and behavior patterns. In this paper, we aim to investigate existing privacy-preserving wireless ILSs and discuss them.