Abstract
The future is mobile and location aware. More and more of our gadgets are portable and have an online presence. For our location-aware mobile future to be safe, we need to demand that our privacy and anonymity be protected. Currently, each and every location aware-system or feature requires us to give new people, corporations and entities access to one of our most intimate attributes, our location.
The main solutions to ameliorate this have been by cloaking or hiding users from service providers or by moving trust to other "more trustable" parties. We want to minimize the need for trust. Your location is your own, and you should not have to pay with your privacy to determine it.
Our focus lies on location estimation services - services that calculate your location based on measurements done on your network equipment - as they are the main drive behind the location-aware future. You can freely choose, discriminate against, and cloak yourself from services asking for your location, whereas removing the ability to determine your own location effectively impedes location awareness.
We are interested in producing a freely available, open source, privacy preserving, community sourced, and safe location estimation service that minimizes the need for trust. In this thesis we focus on three things: Designing such a system, testing different ways of estimating locations, and determining the best way of estimating locations for the designed system.