An Initial Evaluation of the Impact of Location Obfuscation Mechanisms on Geospatial Analysis

Abstract

Since the emergence of GPS capable mobile devices and the increasing demand of contextual services such as location-based services (LBSs), there has been a rising concern for location privacy. This led to the creation of manifold location privacy protection mechanisms (LPPMs) in the scientific community. The authors propose the use of geospatial analyses as an evaluation tool of the impact of noise-based algorithms on location data. For this, the Pinwheel mechanism is tested, using different noise settings, to identify a threshold where privacy is provided, and geostatistical inferences are not affected greatly. Results show that 500 m of random noise introduce a small level of change that does not change the general trend in both heatmap and hotspot analysis but still can provide a minimum level of protection to individuals.