Location Privacy via Differential Private Perturbation of Cloaking Area

Abstract

The increasing use of mobile devices has triggered the development of location based services (LBS). By providing location information to LBS, mobile users can enjoy variety of useful applications utilizing location information, but might suffer the troubles of private information leakage. Location information of mobile users needs to be kept secret while maintaining utility to achieve desirable service quality. Existing location privacy enhancing techniques based on K-anonymity and Hilbert-curve cloaking area generation showed advantages in privacy protection and service quality but disadvantages due to the generation of large cloaking areas that makes query processing and communication less effective. In this paper we propose a novel location privacy preserving scheme that leverages some differential privacy based notions and mechanisms to publish the optimal size cloaking areas from multiple rotated and shifted versions of Hilbert curve. With experimental results, we show that our scheme significantly reduces the average size of cloaking areas compared to previous Hilbert curve method. We also show how to quantify adversary’s ability to perform an inference attack on user location data and how to limit adversary’s success rate under a designed threshold.