Call for Chapters: Privacy and Security Challenges in Location Aware Computing

Location-aware computing is a technology that uses the location (provides whereabouts that is it gives granular geographical information) of people and objects to derive contextual information. Today one can obtain this location information at free of cost through smartphones. Smartphones with location enabled applications have revolutionized the ways in which people perform their activities and get benefits from the automated services. Especially it helps to get details of services in less time; wherever the user may be, and whenever they want. The needs for smartphones and location enabled applications have been growing year after year. Nowadays no one can leave without their phone; phone becomes one of the parts of the human body. So that an individual can be predicted by their phone and the identity of the phone are becoming the person’s identity. Though there is a tremendous need on location enabled applications with smartphones, the debate on privacy and security related with location data has also been growing. Towards this end this book provides an opportunity to various researchers and professionals to discuss the necessity of location privacy preservation, issues and challenges related with protecting the location data and proposals for privacy enhanced location applications development.
The purpose of this book is twofold. Firstly, to discuss how the availability of location data has made revolution for the individuals to realize enormous benefits. Though this seems to be a boon, the services are provided at the cost of exposing the location of the individual to the third parties. This exposed location information could be exploited for, among other things, theft, blackmail, or stalking of individuals. These issues and privacy preserving techniques will be the second fold of this book.