Spatiotemporal Mobility Based Trajectory Privacy-Preserving Algorithm in Location-Based Services

Recent years have seen the wide application of Location-Based Services (LBSs) in our daily life. Although users can enjoy many conveniences from the LBSs, they may lose their trajectory privacy when their location data are collected. Therefore, it is urgent to protect the user’s trajectory privacy while providing high quality services. Trajectory k-anonymity is one of the most important technologies to protect the user’s trajectory privacy. However, the user’s attributes are rarely considered when constructing the k-anonymity set. It results in that the user’s trajectories are especially vulnerable. To solve the problem, in this paper, a Spatiotemporal Mobility (SM) measurement is defined for calculating the relationship between the user’s attributes and the anonymity set. Furthermore, a trajectory graph is designed to model the relationship between trajectories. Based on the user’s attributes and the trajectory graph, the SM based trajectory privacy-preserving algorithm (MTPPA) is proposed. The optimal k-anonymity set is obtained by the simulated annealing algorithm. The experimental results show that the privacy disclosure probability of the anonymity set obtained by MTPPA is about 40% lower than those obtained by the existing algorithms while the same quality of services can be provided.