New type of location data sharing, preserving (some) privacy/accuracy

This ZKLP seems interesting. A way to share location in a way that gives user a way to select accuracy/granularity of location data.

The technique, referred to as Zero-Knowledge Location Privacy (ZKLP), aims to provide access to unverified location data in a way that preserves privacy without sacrificing accuracy and utility for applications that might rely on such data. It’s described in a paper presented this week at the 2025 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.

“With ZKLP, users can prove to any third party that they are within a specific geographical region while obfuscating their exact location for utility and privacy,” the authors claim. “To the best of our knowledge, ZKLP provides the first paradigm for non-interactive, publicly verifiable, and privacy-preserving proofs of geolocation.”

ZKLP does not address the issue of an individual misrepresenting location data (spoofing) – it proves only the location data’s value, not its provenance. […]

[…] But ZKLP has been designed to work with the Discrete Global Grid System (DGGS), a geospatial referencing framework that divides the world into hexagonal grids. It allows users to specify the granularity of their location on the hex grid map – they could choose to be in a city or in a more specific location like a park and their claim would be computationally verifiable.

Article: Boffins devise privacy-preserving location sharing scheme • The Register

When location needs to be shared, this seems like a reasonable way it could be done. Will it be implementable - at scale - is another thing.

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Link to paper from the El Reg article is broken for me (Access Denied). Just me?

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With a quick look, I found an alternative version (2024) from arXiv: [2404.14983] Zero-Knowledge Location Privacy via Accurate Floating-Point SNARKs

It has an interesting end note: Finally, we believe that authenticated ZKLP could be a useful building block in applications for Proof-of-Personhood to obtain verifiable location-based Sybil-resistance [53] and leave its exploration for future work.

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