Differential Privacy Location Protection Scheme Based on Hilbert Curve

Abstract

Location-based services (LBS) applications provide convenience for people’s life and work, but the collection of location information may expose users’ privacy. Since these collected data contain much private information about users, a privacy protection scheme for location information is an impending need. In this paper, a protection scheme DPL-Hc is proposed. Firstly, the users’ location on the map is mapped into one-dimensional space by using Hilbert curve mapping technology. Then, the Laplace noise is added to the location information of one-dimensional space for perturbation, which considers more than 70% of the nonlocation information of users; meanwhile, the disturbance effect is achieved by adding noise. Finally, the disturbed location is submitted to the service provider as the users’ real location to protect the users’ location privacy. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed scheme can protect the users’ location privacy without the trusted third party effectively. It has advantages in data availability, the degree of privacy protection, and the generation time of anonymous data sets, basically achieving the balance between privacy protection and service quality.