Towards Mobile Internet: Location Privacy Threats and Granular Computation Challenges Ling Liu Distributed Data Intensive Systems Lab College of Computing Georgia Institute of Technology lingliu@cc.gatech.edu Abstract The bulk of contents out on the Internet continue to grow at an astounding pace. As computing and communications become ubiquitous, we are entering the Mobile Internet Computing era, where people, devices, and vehicles are connected at all time and the Internet access capability is being embedded in billions of wireless devices such as PDAs, cellular phones, and computers embedded in vehicles (e.g., navigational systems on cars). By extending the Internet through mobile information access, the Mobile Internet is on a trajectory to offer all of the same features and value propositions as the traditional Internet, with the promise of greater information access opportunity, richer and device- spanning Internet services and experiences, thanks to continuous availability and location awareness. While location-aware computing promises convenience, new business opportunities, and a wide array of new quality of life enhancing services, the ability to locate users and mobile objects accurately also opens door for new threats - intrusion of location privacy. Location privacy is defined as the ability to prevent other unauthorized parties from learning one's current or past location. In location-aware computing, there are conceivably two types of location privacy - personal subscriber level privacy and corporate enterprise-level privacy. Companies need enterprise-level privacy to preserve corporate secrets and maintain competitive edge. Location privacy aware computing studies the general computational intelligence and theory for effectively using granules such as clusters, subsets, groups and intervals to build an efficient and yet location privacy preserving computational model for location-aware computing applications. In this keynote, I will discuss location privacy threats and the granular computing challenges for protecting location privacy in the mobile Internet era. I will first