Towards Privacy-Aware Location-Based Recommender Systems

With the diffusion of new generations of GPS-enabled smartphones, location-based recommender systems are appearing on market, allowing users to get personalized suggestions on-the-go about new places to visit based on user tastes. Although these systems are getting very popular and their functionalities look very attractive to users, a number of location-privacy issues are arising. In this paper we give an overview of the working principles of current location-based recommender systems, analysing them from the user privacy perspective. We then call for a new approach to location-based recommendation based on homomorphic encryption in order to enhance users’ privacy.