A Solution to Privacy Preservation in Publishing Human Trajectories

Abstract

With rapid development of ubiquitous computing and location-based services (LBSs), human trajectory data and associated activities are increasingly easily recorded. Inappropriately publishing trajectory data may leak users’ privacy. Therefore, we study publishing trajectory data while preserving privacy, denoted privacy-preserving activity trajectories publishing (PPATP). We propose S-PPATP to solve this problem. S-PPATP comprises three steps: modeling, algorithm design and algorithm adjustment. During modeling, two user models describe users’ behaviors: one based on a Markov chain and the other based on the hidden Markov model. We assume a potential adversary who intends to infer users’ privacy, defined as a set of sensitive information. An adversary model is then proposed to define the adversary’s background knowledge and inference method. Additionally, privacy requirements and a data quality metric are defined for assessment. During algorithm design, we propose two publishing algorithms corresponding to the user models and prove that both algorithms satisfy the privacy requirement. Then, we perform a comparative analysis on utility, efficiency and speedup techniques. Finally, we evaluate our algorithms through experiments on several datasets. The experiment results verify that our proposed algorithms preserve users’ privay. We also test utility and discuss the privacy-utility tradeoff that real-world data publishers may face.