Differential Privacy in Aggregated Mobility Networks: Balancing Privacy and Utility

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Main Authors: Haydari, Ammar, Chuah, Chen-Nee, Zhang, Michael, Macfarlane, Jane, Peisert, Sean
Format: Preprint
Published: 2021
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_version_ 1866911757052674048
author Haydari, Ammar
Chuah, Chen-Nee
Zhang, Michael
Macfarlane, Jane
Peisert, Sean
author_facet Haydari, Ammar
Chuah, Chen-Nee
Zhang, Michael
Macfarlane, Jane
Peisert, Sean
contents Location data is collected from users continuously to understand their mobility patterns. Releasing the user trajectories may compromise user privacy. Therefore, the general practice is to release aggregated location datasets. However, private information may still be inferred from an aggregated version of location trajectories. Differential privacy (DP) protects the query output against inference attacks regardless of background knowledge. This paper presents a differential privacy-based privacy model that protects the user's origins and destinations from being inferred from aggregated mobility datasets. This is achieved by injecting Planar Laplace noise to the user origin and destination GPS points. The noisy GPS points are then transformed into a link representation using a link-matching algorithm. Finally, the link trajectories form an aggregated mobility network. The injected noise level is selected using the Sparse Vector Mechanism. This DP selection mechanism considers the link density of the location and the functional category of the localized links. Compared to the different baseline models, including a k-anonymity method, our differential privacy-based aggregation model offers query responses that are close to the raw data in terms of aggregate statistics at both the network and trajectory-levels with maximum 9% deviation from the baseline in terms of network length.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2112_08487
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Differential Privacy in Aggregated Mobility Networks: Balancing Privacy and Utility
Haydari, Ammar
Chuah, Chen-Nee
Zhang, Michael
Macfarlane, Jane
Peisert, Sean
Cryptography and Security
Location data is collected from users continuously to understand their mobility patterns. Releasing the user trajectories may compromise user privacy. Therefore, the general practice is to release aggregated location datasets. However, private information may still be inferred from an aggregated version of location trajectories. Differential privacy (DP) protects the query output against inference attacks regardless of background knowledge. This paper presents a differential privacy-based privacy model that protects the user's origins and destinations from being inferred from aggregated mobility datasets. This is achieved by injecting Planar Laplace noise to the user origin and destination GPS points. The noisy GPS points are then transformed into a link representation using a link-matching algorithm. Finally, the link trajectories form an aggregated mobility network. The injected noise level is selected using the Sparse Vector Mechanism. This DP selection mechanism considers the link density of the location and the functional category of the localized links. Compared to the different baseline models, including a k-anonymity method, our differential privacy-based aggregation model offers query responses that are close to the raw data in terms of aggregate statistics at both the network and trajectory-levels with maximum 9% deviation from the baseline in terms of network length.
title Differential Privacy in Aggregated Mobility Networks: Balancing Privacy and Utility
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.08487