Location obfuscation is a technique used in location-based services or information systems to protect the location of the users by slightly altering, substituting or generalizing their location in order to avoid reflecting their real position.
A formal definition of location obfuscation can be "the means of deliberately degrading the quality of information about an individual's location in order to protect that individual's location privacy.
Obfuscation techniques
The most common techniques to perform this change are:
One example of the application of location obfuscation can be seen in the following figure.
In this figure, a linear path is obfuscated by two versions of the random noise technique, in which a maximum random noise of 20 (red) and 40 (green) meters is added to the original path (blue), showing a very different trajectory and not revealing the real location of the user.