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Handbook of mobile data privacy
Gkoulalas-Divanis A., Bettini C., Springer International Publishing, New York, NY, 2018. 403 pp. Type: Book (978-3-319981-60-4)
Date Reviewed: Jul 22 2019

Location, location, location! If you are at risk of being targeted by an intelligent guided missile and you want to survive, I can only suggest you turn off your cellphone. But OK, let’s be realistic: if you’re worrying about this, you’ve got bigger problems than keeping your location secret. For the other 99.99999 percent of the population (feel free to add more nines), disclosing your location might not be life threatening, but at times could prove to be very annoying, disappointing, or even frustrating.

By being connected to the digital world through our cellphones, tablets, computers, and wearable devices, we are consciously or unconsciously exposing vast amounts of personal information. I’m not talking about yesterday’s party pictures that you shared on Twitter and now regret more than the devastating hangover--there’s no cure for stupidity, I’m afraid. I’m talking about the information that we share, mostly inadvertently, when we use a search engine to ask for directions, a mobile app to find the closest restaurant, or a virtual map to pinpoint the cheapest gas station in the neighborhood. Our whereabouts reveal sensible information about our habits, tastes, and preferences, and as a result are very valuable to a variety of companies that have founded their businesses on trading with our data.

Some of us are ready to share pieces of our private information in return for a service, some others might not be so willing to do so, and yet others simply don’t care about their privacy at all. Despite our willingness to share private data, regulations such as the European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) limit what companies can and cannot collect, analyze, and share. Privacy protection techniques are becoming mandatory worldwide.

If you’re facing the dilemma of choosing between using location-based services or keeping your mobility information safe, Handbook of mobile data privacy will provide some food for thought, clues, references, and interesting discussions to help you make a decision. The editors, Aris Gkoulalas-Divanis and Claudio Bettini, have put together a representative set of chapters on the various interwoven topics that constitute the research field of location privacy protection and analysis. Some chapters are introductory and hence intended for the general public, while some others are more technical and require a background in computer science, mathematics, and related disciplines. In this sense, some chapters could be useful as introductory material for undergraduates and master’s students, and some others could be used as a starting point for PhD students.

After an introductory chapter by the editors, the handbook is divided into three parts. The first part, “Fundamentals for Privacy in Mobility Data,” comprises two chapters that introduce readers to the basic problems related to mobility, location, and privacy. Concepts such as re-indentification, trends, and pattern mining are explained, and location sensing technologies are presented.

The second part, “Main Research Directions in Mobility Data Privacy,” consists of seven chapters that aim at identifying emerging research lines in the field (although some of them are not really new), including privacy techniques for location-based services (LBS), differential privacy as an alternative to k-anonymity and cloaking, crowdsourcing, location-based social networks, vehicular networks, and privacy by design.

Part 3, “Usability, Systems and Applications,” has four chapters about systems and real applications that implement privacy protection techniques. This part is especially interesting and relevant considering the current growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the discussion on context-adaptive privacy.

Overall, although mobility data privacy is not a new topic, new techniques appear frequently and the body of knowledge is steadily growing. This handbook is an interesting, well-prepared, and seriously edited library addition for anyone interested in privacy.

Reviewer:  Agusti Solanas Review #: CR146628 (1910-0352)
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