Abstract

Location-based services (LBS) have grown in popularity due to technological improvements and the widespread use of GPS, mobile devices, and wireless communication. Ensuring the protection of location data and its corresponding attributes while simultaneously delivering high-quality services poses an enormous challenge, particularly in the context of continuous surveillance and sharing of users' location information. This gives rise to legitimate concerns regarding the privacy and security of sensitive personal data. Particularly in healthcare situations, maintaining user privacy is of the highest priority. This paper proposes an Enhanced User and Anonymizer Cache (EUAC) architecture based on a trusted third-party (TTP) approach. The EUAC approach incorporates user authentication, query caching, and anonymization techniques to protect user information by minimizing communication connections, increasing cache hit rates, and reducing privacy leakage risks. While employing anonymization, we propose the Cloaking Region algorithm that utilizes the Euclidean distance approach to disseminate selected dummy locations as widely as possible. The results validate the efficiency and effectiveness of our architecture concerning cache hit rates, communication overhead, response times, and entropy.