Section: New Results

Automatic Privacy and Utility Preservation of Mobility Data: A Nonlinear Model-Based Approach

Participant : Antoine Boutet.

The widespread use of mobile devices and location-based services has generated massive amounts of mobility databases. While processing these data is highly valuable, privacy issues can occur if personal information is revealed. The prior art has investigated ways to protect mobility data by providing a large range of Location Privacy Protection Mechanisms (LPPMs). However, the privacy level of the protected data significantly varies depending on the protection mechanism used, its configuration and on the characteristics of the mobility data. Meanwhile, the protected data still needs to enable some useful processing. To tackle these issues, in this work we present PULP, a framework that finds the suitable protection mechanism and automatically configures it for each user in order to achieve user-defined objectives in terms of both privacy and utility. PULP uses nonlinear models to capture the impact of each LPPM on data privacy and utility levels. Evaluation of our framework is carried out with two protection mechanisms of the literature and four real-world mobility datasets. Results show the efficiency of PULP, its robustness and adaptability. Comparisons between LPPMs' configurator and the state of the art further illustrate that PULP better realizes users' objectives and its computations time is in orders of magnitude faster.