Differentiated Location Privacy Protection in Mobile Communication Services: A Survey from the Semantic Perception Perspective

Mobile communication services raise users’ privacy concerns in sharing their traveling trajectories while facilitating people’s daily lives. According to these shared trajectories, adversaries can dig users’ multi-modal behavioral semantics by combining with extensive open-source web information. These behavioral semantics raise different levels of privacy concerns to users. We name it the differentiated privacy sensitivity. It makes users have personalized requirements for protecting their travelings. This results in the inevitable evolutionary trend from location privacy protection (LPP) to differentiated location privacy protection (DLPP). DLPP simulates the potential attacks to dig into mobile semantics and characterize the differentiated location sensitivity. It provides the privacy protection with differentiated strength to each location. Differentiated and appropriate strength well balances the tradeoff between privacy protection and data availability for the application QoS. We are motivated to conduct a comprehensive survey on DLPP from the semantic perception perspective. It forms a complete overview of the mobile semantics-aware differentiation in location privacy protection. Specifically, we first review the research works on the multi-modal mobile semantic representation. Then, taking the dug semantics as a clue, we summarize the basic principles of DLPP researches systematically. To complete the overview, we also summarize their design modes and discuss the open opportunities and challenges for future works.