Privacy-preserving Publication of Mobility Data with High Utility
This addresses privacy risks for individuals in mobility data publication, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing anonymization techniques with specific enhancements.
The paper tackles the problem of privacy threats in published mobility data by proposing a solution that hides users' points of interest through constant speed enforcement and swaps trajectories at meeting points, resulting in improved privacy without specifying concrete utility numbers.
An increasing amount of mobility data is being collected every day by different means, e.g., by mobile phone operators. This data is sometimes published after the application of simple anonymization techniques, which might lead to severe privacy threats. We propose in this paper a new solution whose novelty is twofold. Firstly, we introduce an algorithm designed to hide places where a user stops during her journey (namely points of interest), by enforcing a constant speed along her trajectory. Secondly, we leverage places where users meet to take a chance to swap their trajectories and therefore confuse an attacker.