As smartphones are increasingly used to run apps that provide users
with location-based services, the users’ location privacy has become
a major concern. Existing solutions to this concern are defi-
cient in terms of practicality, efficiency, and effectiveness. To address
this problem, we design, implement, and evaluate LP-Guardian,
a novel and comprehensive framework for location privacy protection
for Android smartphone users. LP-Guardian overcomes the
shortcomings of existing approaches by addressing the tracking,
profiling, and identification threats while maintaining app functionality.
We have implemented and evaluated LP-Guardian on Android
4.3.1. Our evaluation results show that LP-Guardian effectively
thwarts the privacy threats, without deteriorating the user’s
experience (less than 10% overhead in delay and energy). Also,
LP-Guardian’s privacy protection is shown to be achieved at a tolerable
loss in app functionality