Noise-added selection method for location-based service using differential privacy in Internet of Things

Abstract

With the development of Internet of Things, many applications need to use people’s location information, resulting in a large amount of data need to be processed, called big data. In recent years, people propose many methods to protect privacy in the location-based service aspect. However, existing technologies have poor performance in big data area. For instance, sensor equipments such as smart phones with location record function may submit location information anytime and anywhere which may lead to privacy disclosure. Attackers can leverage huge data to achieve useful information. In this article, we propose noise-added selection algorithm, a location privacy protection method that satisfies differential privacy to prevent the data from privacy disclosure by attacker with arbitrary background knowledge. In view of Internet of Things, we maximize the availability of data and algorithm when protecting the information. In detail, we filter real-time location distribution information, use our selection mechanism for comparison and analysis to determine privacy-protected regions, and then perform differential privacy on them. As shown in the theoretical analysis and the experimental results, the proposed method can achieve significant improvements in security, privacy, and complete a perfect balance between privacy protection level and data availability.