Protecting Location Privacy of Users Based on Trajectory Obfuscation in Mobile Crowdsensing

In mobile crowdsensing activities, it is usually necessary for participants to upload sensing data and related locations. The existing location privacy-preserving mechanisms cannot well protect a user's trajectory privacy because attackers can mine the user's trajectory features through data analysis techniques. Aiming at the trajectory privacy protection problem, this article proposes a differential location privacy-preserving mechanism based on trajectory obfuscation (LPMT). LPMT first extracts the stay points as the features of a trajectory based on the sliding window algorithm, and then obfuscates each stay point to a target obfuscation subregion through the exponential mechanism, and finally performs the Laplace sampling in the target obfuscation subregion to obtain the obfuscated GPS points. Compared with the baseline mechanisms, LPMT can reduce data quality loss by more than 20% while providing the same level of obfuscation quality, which indicates that LPMT has the advantages of strong security and high quality of service.

Automated summary

This article proposes a differential location privacy-preserving mechanism based on trajectory obfuscation (LPMT), which extracts trajectory features through a sliding window algorithm and performs Laplace sampling in the target obfuscation subregion to obtain obfuscated GPS points. LPMT can reduce data quality loss by over 20% while providing the same level of obfuscation quality, indicating its strong security and high quality of service.