Achieving local differential location privacy protection in 3D space via Hilbert encoding and optimized random response

Abstract

The widespread use of spatial location-based services not only provides considerable convenience, but also exposes the downsides of location privacy leakage. Most of the existing user-side location privacy protection techniques are limited to planar locations. However, the extensive use of aircraft, sensor equipment and acquisition devices with positioning functions promotes the urgency of protecting the privacy of 3D spatial locations. Therefore, this study suggests a local differential privacy protection approach for 3D spatial locations. A 3D spatial decomposition and Hilbert encoding method are designed to reduce the 3D location data into one-dimensional encoding. The optimized random response mechanism was utilized to perturb the dimensional-reduced location encoding, which not only achieves user-side location privacy protection but also improves the accuracy of aggregated data on the server-side. Experiments on the real spatial location datasets show that the suggested method can reduce spatial location service quality loss, maintain the availability of perturbed spatial location and improve the operation efficiency of the spatial location perturbation algorithm.