1,384 research outputs found
On the inference of user paths from anonymized mobility data
Using the plethora of apps on smartphones and
tablets entails giving them access to different types of privacy
sensitive information, including the device’s location. This can
potentially compromise user privacy when app providers share
user data with third parties (e.g., advertisers) for monetization
purposes. In this paper, we focus on the interface for data
sharing between app providers and third parties, and devise
an attack that can break the strongest form of the commonly
used anonymization method for protecting the privacy of users.
More specifically, we develop a mechanism called
Comber
that given completely anonymized mobility data (without any
pseudonyms) as input is able to identify different users and
their respective paths in the data.
Comber
exploits the obser-
vation that the distribution of speeds is typically similar among
different users and incorporates a generic, empirically derived
histogram of user speeds to identify the users and disentangle
their paths.
Comber
also benefits from two optimizations that
allow it to reduce the path inference time for large datasets. We
use two real datasets with mobile user location traces (Mobile
Data Challenge and GeoLife) for evaluating the effectiveness
of
Comber
and show that it can infer paths with greater than
90% accuracy with both these dataset
Knowing Your Population: Privacy-Sensitive Mining of Massive Data
Location and mobility patterns of individuals are important to environmental
planning, societal resilience, public health, and a host of commercial
applications. Mining telecommunication traffic and transactions data for such
purposes is controversial, in particular raising issues of privacy. However,
our hypothesis is that privacy-sensitive uses are possible and often beneficial
enough to warrant considerable research and development efforts. Our work
contends that peoples behavior can yield patterns of both significant
commercial, and research, value. For such purposes, methods and algorithms for
mining telecommunication data to extract commonly used routes and locations,
articulated through time-geographical constructs, are described in a case study
within the area of transportation planning and analysis. From the outset, these
were designed to balance the privacy of subscribers and the added value of
mobility patterns derived from their mobile communication traffic and
transactions data. Our work directly contrasts the current, commonly held
notion that value can only be added to services by directly monitoring the
behavior of individuals, such as in current attempts at location-based
services. We position our work within relevant legal frameworks for privacy and
data protection, and show that our methods comply with such requirements and
also follow best-practice
Spatio-Temporal Techniques for User Identification by means of GPS Mobility Data
One of the greatest concerns related to the popularity of GPS-enabled devices
and applications is the increasing availability of the personal location
information generated by them and shared with application and service
providers. Moreover, people tend to have regular routines and be characterized
by a set of "significant places", thus making it possible to identify a user
from his/her mobility data.
In this paper we present a series of techniques for identifying individuals
from their GPS movements. More specifically, we study the uniqueness of GPS
information for three popular datasets, and we provide a detailed analysis of
the discriminatory power of speed, direction and distance of travel. Most
importantly, we present a simple yet effective technique for the identification
of users from location information that are not included in the original
dataset used for training, thus raising important privacy concerns for the
management of location datasets.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure
Spatio-temporal techniques for user identification by means of GPS mobility data
One of the greatest concerns related to the popularity of GPS-enabled devices and applications is the increasing availability of the personal location information generated by them and shared with application and service providers. Moreover, people tend to have regular routines and be characterized by a set of \u201csignificant places\u201d, thus making it possible to identify a user from his/her mobility data.
In this paper we present a series of techniques for identifying individuals from their GPS movements. More specifically, we study the uniqueness of GPS information for three popular datasets, and we provide a detailed analysis of the discriminatory power of speed, direction and distance of travel. Most importantly, we present a simple yet effective technique for the identification of users from location information that are not included in the original dataset used for training, thus raising important privacy concerns for the management of location datasets
Privacy and trustworthiness management in moving object environments
The use of location-based services (LBS) (e.g., Intel\u27s Thing Finder) is expanding. Besides the traditional centralized location-based services, distributed ones are also emerging due to the development of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs), a dynamic network which allows vehicles to communicate with one another. Due to the nature of the need of tracking users\u27 locations, LBS have raised increasing concerns on users\u27 location privacy. Although many research has been carried out for users to submit their locations anonymously, the collected anonymous location data may still be mapped to individuals when the adversary has related background knowledge.
To improve location privacy, in this dissertation, the problem of anonymizing the collected location datasets is addressed so that they can be published for public use without violating any privacy concerns. Specifically, a privacy-preserving trajectory publishing algorithm is proposed that preserves high data utility rate. Moreover, the scalability issue is tackled in the case the location datasets grows gigantically due to continuous data collection as well as increase of LBS users by developing a distributed version of our trajectory publishing algorithm which leveraging the MapReduce technique.
As a consequence of users being anonymous, it becomes more challenging to evaluate the trustworthiness of messages disseminated by anonymous users. Existing research efforts are mainly focused on privacy-preserving authentication of users which helps in tracing malicious vehicles only after the damage is done. However, it is still not sufficient to prevent malicious behavior from happening in the case where attackers do not care whether they are caught later on. Therefore, it would be more effective to also evaluate the content of the message. In this dissertation, a novel information-oriented trustworthiness evaluation is presented which enables each individual user to evaluate the message content and make informed decisions --Abstract, page iii
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