Differentially Private Timestamps Publishing in Trajectory

Abstract

In recent years, location-based social media has become popular, and a large number of spatiotemporal trajectory data have been generated. Although these data have significant mining value, they also pose a great threat to the privacy of users. At present, many studies have realized the privacy-preserving mechanism of location data in social media in terms of data utility and privacy preservation, but rarely have any of them considered the correlation between timestamps and geographical location. To solve this problem, in this paper, we first propose a k-anonymity-based mechanism to hide the user’s specific time segment during a single day, and then propose an optimized truncated Laplacian mechanism to add noise to each data grid (the frequency of time data) of the anonymized time distribution. The time data after secondary processing are fuzzy and uncertain, which not only protects the privacy of the user’s geographical location from the time dimension but also retains a certain value of data mining. Experiments on real datasets show that the TDP privacy-preserving model has good utility.