The pervasiveness of location-aware devices has spawned extensive research in trajectory data mining, resulting in many important real-life applications. Yet, the privacy issue in sharing trajectory data among different parties often creates an obstacle for effective data mining. In this paper, we study the challenges of anonymizing trajectory data: high dimensionality, sparseness, and sequentiality. Employing traditional privacy models and anonymization methods often leads to low data utility in the resulting data and ineffective data mining. In addressing these challenges, this is the first paper to introduce local suppression to achieve a tailored privacy model for trajectory data anonymization. The framework allows the adoption of various data utility metrics for different data mining tasks. As an illustration, we aim at preserving both instances of location-time doublets and frequent sequences in a trajectory database, both being the foundation of many trajectory data * Corresponding author Email addresses: ru_che@encs.concordia.ca (Rui Chen), fung@ciise.concordia.ca (Benjamin C. M. Fung), no_moham@encs.concordia.ca (Noman Mohammed), bcdesai@cs.concordia.ca (Bipin C. Desai) April 10, 2011 mining tasks. Our experiments on both synthetic and real-life data sets suggest that the framework is effective and efficient to overcome the challenges in trajectory data anonymization. In particular, compared with the previous works in the literature, our proposed local suppression method can significantly improve the data utility in anonymous trajectory data.
By introducing local suppression to trajectory data anonymization to enhance the resulting data utility, Chen et al. REF obtained a ( , ) -privacy model on trajectory data without paying extra utility and computation cost and proposed an anonymization framework that is independent of the underlying data utility metrics and is suitable for different trajectory data mining workloads.
Privacy-preserving trajectory data publishing by local suppression
Inf. Sci.
Inf. Sci.
Computer Science