While the mobile Internet provides location-based and other useful services, it also introduces new privacy risks. This paper describes mCrowds, an anonymity technology for the mobile Internet developed at Karlstad University, and discusses its theoretical anonymity properties. mCrowds enables anonymous WAP browsing and can further be used to minimize the disclosure of personal information when using location-based services. Performance is of key importance for mobile Internet technologies, and

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... has for this reason been an important design goal during the development of mCrowds. This paper therefore also studies the theoretical performance properties of mCrowds and the tradeoff between anonymity and performance. Besides, it provides and discusses the results of a practical performance evaluation of mCrowds. These evaluation results are promising as the overhead in performance introduced by mCrowds is relatively small compared to the total response latency when fetching WAP pages via the mobile Internet.