A trajectory privacy protection method based on random sampling differential privacy

Abstract

With the popularity of location-aware devices (e.g., smart phones), a large number of trajectory data were collected. The trajectory dataset can be used in many fields including traffic monitoring, market analysis, city management, etc. The collection and release of trajectory data will raise serious privacy concerns for users. If users’ privacy is not protected enough, they will refuse to share their trajectory data. In this paper, a new trajectory privacy protection method based on random sampling differential privacy (TPRSDP), which can provide more security protection, is proposed. Compared with other methods, it takes less time to run this method. Experiments are conducted on two real world datasets to validate the proposed scheme, and the results are compared with others in terms of running time and information loss. The performance of the scheme with different parameter values is verified. The setting of the new scheme parameters is discussed in detail, and some valuable suggestions are given.