On guaranteeing k-anonymity in location databases

Abstract

The development of location-based services and mobile devices has lead to an increase in the location data. Through the data mining process, some valuable information can be discovered from location data. However, the attackers may also extract some private (sensitive) information of the user and this can make threats against the user location privacy. Therefore, location privacy protection becomes a key factor to the success in privacy preserving in location-based services. In this paper, we propose a new approach as well as an algorithm to guarantee k-anonymity in a location database. The algorithm will maintain the association rules which have significance for the data mining process. Moreover, the algorithm also considers excluding new significant association rules created during the run of the algorithm. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.