Method and apparatus for providing location information of mobile terminal

Abstract

The present invention provides a method and apparatus for providing location information of a mobile terminal, which help to shorten the time for determining an anonymous area of a user. The present invention also aims at reducing the size of the anonymous space area as much as possible so as to ensure the quality of a location-based service. The method for providing location information of a mobile terminal in the present invention comprises: acquiring information about space division from a server, the space division meaning that a specified space is divided into grids with preset side lengths, and acquiring the numbers of mobile terminals in the grids from the server; determining a grid where a mobile terminal is currently located according to the information about the space division; for the grid where the mobile terminal is currently located, determining whether the area of the grid and/or the number of mobile terminals in the grid reaches a preset value, and if yes, providing an identifier of the grid to the server; otherwise, merging the grid with grids near the grid until the area of the multiple merged grids and/or the number of mobile terminals in the grids reaches the preset value, and providing identifiers of the multiple grids to the server.