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User-side adaptive protection of location privacy in participatory sensing

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Abstract

The participatory sensing paradigm, through the growing availability of cheap sensors in mobile devices, enables applications of great social and business interest, e.g., electrosmog exposure measurement and early earthquake detection. However, users’ privacy concerns regarding their activity traces need to be adequately addressed as well. The existing static privacy-enabling approaches, which hide or obfuscate data, offer some protection at the expense of data value. These approaches do not offer privacy guarantees and heterogeneous user privacy requirements cannot be met by them. In this paper, we propose a user-side privacy-protection scheme; it adaptively adjusts its parameters, in order to meet personalized location-privacy protection requirements against adversaries in a measurable manner. As proved by simulation experiments with artificial- and real-data traces, when feasible, our approach not only always satisfies personal location-privacy concerns, but also maximizes data utility (in terms of error, data availability, area coverage), as compared to static privacy-protection schemes.

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Notes

  1. D(loc 1, loc 2) can be the absolute distance function, in which case the expected distortion would be in km or meters. We choose to normalize it for the sake of presenting results with a uniform upper bound on the privacy level.

  2. Note that the size of the obfuscation area at time t 3 is 2 × 2 (as shown in Fig. 4b), therefore there are 4 vertices corresponding to 4 reported locations at this time instant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer & Communication Sciences, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, 1015, Switzerland

    Berker Agir, Thanasis G. Papaioannou, Rammohan Narendula, Karl Aberer & Jean-Pierre Hubaux

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  1. Berker Agir
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  2. Thanasis G. Papaioannou
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  3. Rammohan Narendula
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  4. Karl Aberer
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  5. Jean-Pierre Hubaux
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Correspondence to Berker Agir.

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This work has been partially supported by the EU project OpenIoT (ICT 287305).

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Agir, B., Papaioannou, T.G., Narendula, R. et al. User-side adaptive protection of location privacy in participatory sensing. Geoinformatica 18, 165–191 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10707-013-0193-z

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