Protecting Moving Trajectories with Dummies

Abstract

Dummy-based anonymization techniques for protecting location privacy of mobile users have been proposed in the literature. By generating dummies that move in humanlike trajectories, shows that location privacy of mobile users can be preserved. However, by monitoring long-term movement patterns of users, the trajectories of mobile users can still be exposed. We argue that, once the trajectory of a user is identified, locations of the user is exposed. Thus, it's critical to protect the moving trajectories of mobile users in order to preserve user location privacy. We propose two schemes that generate consistent movement patterns in a long run. Guided by three parameters in user specified privacy profile, namely, short- term disclosure, long-term disclosure and distance deviation, the proposed schemes derive movement trajectories for dummies. A preliminary performance study shows that our approach is more effective than existing work in protecting moving trajectories of mobile users and their location privacy.