Towards location and trajectory privacy protection in participatory sensing

Abstract

The ubiquity of mobile devices has facilitated the prevalence of participatory sensing, whereby ordinary citizens using their private mobile devices to collect regional information and share with participators. However, such applications may endanger users' privacy by revealing their locations and trajectories information. Most of existing solutions, which hide a user's location information with a coarse region, are under k-anonymity model. Yet, they may not be applicable in some participatory sensing applications which require precise location information for high quality of service. In this paper, we present a method to protect the user's location and trajectory privacy with high quality of service in some participatory sensing applications. Then, we utilize a new metric, called Slope Ratio (SR), to evaluate the method we proposed. The analysis and simulation results show that the method can protect the user's location and trajectory privacy effectively. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.