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

Mobile communication services raise user privacy concerns in sharing the 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 have differentiated privacy sensitivity, raising different levels of privacy concerns. It makes users have personalized requirements for protecting their travelings. Resulting in the inevitable evolutionary trend from location privacy protection to differentiated location privacy protection (DLPP). DLPP digs into mobile semantics and characterizes the differentiated location sensitivity by simulating the potential attacks. 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 quality of application service. 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 multi-modal mobile semantic representation. Then, taking the dug semantics as a clue, we summarize the basic principles of DLPP research systematically. To complete the overview, we also summarize their design modes and discuss the open opportunities and challenges for future works.