SoK: Can Trajectory Generation Combine Privacy and Utility?

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Main Authors: Buchholz, Erik, Abuadbba, Alsharif, Wang, Shuo, Nepal, Surya, Kanhere, Salil S.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Buchholz, Erik
Abuadbba, Alsharif
Wang, Shuo
Nepal, Surya
Kanhere, Salil S.
author_facet Buchholz, Erik
Abuadbba, Alsharif
Wang, Shuo
Nepal, Surya
Kanhere, Salil S.
contents While location trajectories represent a valuable data source for analyses and location-based services, they can reveal sensitive information, such as political and religious preferences. Differentially private publication mechanisms have been proposed to allow for analyses under rigorous privacy guarantees. However, the traditional protection schemes suffer from a limiting privacy-utility trade-off and are vulnerable to correlation and reconstruction attacks. Synthetic trajectory data generation and release represent a promising alternative to protection algorithms. While initial proposals achieve remarkable utility, they fail to provide rigorous privacy guarantees. This paper proposes a framework for designing a privacy-preserving trajectory publication approach by defining five design goals, particularly stressing the importance of choosing an appropriate Unit of Privacy. Based on this framework, we briefly discuss the existing trajectory protection approaches, emphasising their shortcomings. This work focuses on the systematisation of the state-of-the-art generative models for trajectories in the context of the proposed framework. We find that no existing solution satisfies all requirements. Thus, we perform an experimental study evaluating the applicability of six sequential generative models to the trajectory domain. Finally, we conclude that a generative trajectory model providing semantic guarantees remains an open research question and propose concrete next steps for future research.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_07218
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SoK: Can Trajectory Generation Combine Privacy and Utility?
Buchholz, Erik
Abuadbba, Alsharif
Wang, Shuo
Nepal, Surya
Kanhere, Salil S.
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
While location trajectories represent a valuable data source for analyses and location-based services, they can reveal sensitive information, such as political and religious preferences. Differentially private publication mechanisms have been proposed to allow for analyses under rigorous privacy guarantees. However, the traditional protection schemes suffer from a limiting privacy-utility trade-off and are vulnerable to correlation and reconstruction attacks. Synthetic trajectory data generation and release represent a promising alternative to protection algorithms. While initial proposals achieve remarkable utility, they fail to provide rigorous privacy guarantees. This paper proposes a framework for designing a privacy-preserving trajectory publication approach by defining five design goals, particularly stressing the importance of choosing an appropriate Unit of Privacy. Based on this framework, we briefly discuss the existing trajectory protection approaches, emphasising their shortcomings. This work focuses on the systematisation of the state-of-the-art generative models for trajectories in the context of the proposed framework. We find that no existing solution satisfies all requirements. Thus, we perform an experimental study evaluating the applicability of six sequential generative models to the trajectory domain. Finally, we conclude that a generative trajectory model providing semantic guarantees remains an open research question and propose concrete next steps for future research.
title SoK: Can Trajectory Generation Combine Privacy and Utility?
topic Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07218