Location-aware computing not only creates many new opportunities for location-based applications, but also opens doors for new vulnerabilities and significant privacy risks. Location privacy protection confronts two unique challenges. First, location privacy requires a careful tradeoff between the quality of service provided by the service provider and the desired location privacy of the user; and second, location privacy represents personal experience and is context sensitive. The ``one size fits all'' solution will not scale. This project designs and develops: 1) a secure and customizable architecture for privacy-aware location-based services, which offers a careful combination of policy-based location privacy mechanisms and location anonymization based privacy schemes; 2) a set of safeguards for secure publication, subscription, transmission, use and storage of location information; and 3) a suite of privacy protection techniques for reducing the risks of unauthorized disclosure of location information, while maintaining the performance and service quality of location-based applications. The resulting capabilities are expected to have a significant practical impact on a broad range of location-aware applications that demand location privacy protection, from location-based industrial monitoring, such as intelligent transportation tracking, to location-based entertainment and homeland security. The prototype implementation and experimental research of this project are used as a teaching tool for courses covering mobile and advanced Internet computing technology. The educational program also includes training students through hand-on research, course projects or special problem courses on location-privacy protection enabled information delivery and dissemination applications. The project results will be disseminated via the following Web site
