• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.8 no.8
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• pp.1155-1160
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• 2013

The rapid growth of smart phones has made location-based services (LBSs) widely available. However, the use of LBS can raise privacy issues, as LBS can allow adversaries to violate the location privacy of users. There has been a considerable amount of research on preserving user location privacy. Most of these studies try to preserve location privacy by achieving what is known as location K-anonymity. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical clustering-based spatial cloaking algorithm for LBSs. The proposed algorithm constructs a tree using a modified version of agglomerative hierarchical clustering. The experimental results show, in terms of the ASR size, that the proposed algorithm is better than Hilbert Cloak and comparable to RC-AR (R-tree Cloak implementation of Reciprocal with an Asymmetric R-tree split). In terms of the ASR generation time, the proposed algorithm is much better in its performance than RC-AR and similar in performance to Hilbert Cloak.