Efficient Utility Improvement for Location Privacy - Inria - Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique
Journal Articles Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies Year : 2017

Efficient Utility Improvement for Location Privacy

Abstract

The continuously increasing use of location-based services poses an important threat to the privacy of users. A natural defense is to employ an obfuscation mechanism, such as those providing geo-indistinguishability, a framework for obtaining formal privacy guarantees that has become popular in recent years. Ideally, one would like to employ an optimal obfuscation mechanism, providing the best utility among those satisfying the required privacy level. In theory optimal mechanisms can be constructed via linear programming. In practice, however, this is only feasible for a radically small number of locations. As a consequence, all known applications of geo-indistinguishability simply use noise drawn from a planar Laplace distribution. In this work, we study methods for substantially improving the utility of location obfuscation, while maintaining practical applicability as a main goal. We provide such solutions for both infinite (continuous or discrete) as well as large but finite domains of locations, using a Bayesian remapping procedure as a key ingredient. We evaluate our techniques in two real world complete datasets, without any restriction on the evaluation area, and show important utility improvements with respect to the standard planar Laplace approach.
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
PoPETS-published.pdf (740.13 Ko) Télécharger le fichier
Origin Publication funded by an institution
Loading...

Dates and versions

hal-01422842 , version 1 (27-12-2016)
hal-01422842 , version 2 (22-07-2017)

Licence

Identifiers

Cite

Konstantinos Chatzikokolakis, Ehab Elsalamouny, Catuscia Palamidessi. Efficient Utility Improvement for Location Privacy. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, 2017, 2017 (4), pp.308-328. ⟨10.1515/popets-2017-0051⟩. ⟨hal-01422842v2⟩
1213 View
563 Download

Altmetric

Share

More