Differential Privacy Preservation for Location Semantics

With the rapid development of intelligent mobile terminals and communication technologies, location-based services (LBSs) have become an essential part of users’ lives. LBS providers upload and share the collected users’ location data. The more commonly used methods for location privacy protection are differential privacy and its extensions. However, the semantic information about location, which is an integral part of the location data, often contains sensitive user information. Most existing research methods have failed to pay enough attention to protecting the semantic information in the location data. To remedy this problem, two different scenarios for location semantic privacy protection methods are proposed in this paper to address single-point and continuous location queries. Simulation experiments on real social location check-in datasets, and comparison of three different privacy protection mechanisms, show that our solution demonstrates good service quality and privacy protection considering location semantics.