Obfuscation and anonymization methods for locational privacy protection : a systematic literature review

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesThe mobile technology development combined with the business model of a majority of application companies is posing a potential risk to individuals’ privacy. Because the industry default practice is unrestricted data collection. Although, the data collection has virtuous usage in improve services and procedures; it also undermines user’s privacy. For that reason is crucial to learn what is the privacy protection mechanism state-of-art. Privacy protection can be pursued by passing new regulation and developing preserving mechanism. Understanding in what extent the current technology is capable to protect devices or systems is important to drive the advancements in the privacy preserving field, addressing the limits and challenges to deploy mechanism with a reasonable quality of Service-QoS level. This research aims to display and discuss the current privacy preserving schemes, its capabilities, limitations and challenges

A review paper on preserving privacy in mobile environments

Technology is improving day-by-day and so is the usage of mobile devices. Every activity that would involve manual and paper transactions can now be completed in seconds using your fingertips. On one hand, life has become fairly convenient with the help of mobile devices, whereas on the other hand security of the data and the transactions occurring in the process have been under continuous threat. This paper, re-evaluates the different policies and procedures used for preserving the privacy of sensitive data and device location.. Policy languages have been very vital in the mobile environments as they can be extended/used significantly for sending/receiving any data. In the mobile environment users always go to service providers to access various services. Hence, communications between the service providers and mobile handsets needs to be secured. Also, the data access control needs to be in place. A section of this paper will review the communication paths and channels and their related access criteria. This paper is a contribution to the mobile domain, showing the possible attacks related to privacy and the various mechanisms used to preserve the end-user privacy. In addition, it also gives acomparison of the different privacy preserving methods in mobile environments to provide guidance to the readers. Finally, the paper summarises future research challenges in the area of privacy preservation. This paper examines the ‘where’ problem and in particular, examines tradeoffs between enforcing location security at a device vs. enforcing location security at an edge location server. This paper also sketches an implementation of location security solution at both the device and the edge location server and presents detailed experiments using real mobility and user profile data sets collected from multiple data sources (taxicabs, Smartphones)

Privacy-Aware Recommender Systems Challenge on Twitter's Home Timeline

Recommender systems constitute the core engine of most social network platforms nowadays, aiming to maximize user satisfaction along with other key business objectives. Twitter is no exception. Despite the fact that Twitter data has been extensively used to understand socioeconomic and political phenomena and user behaviour, the implicit feedback provided by users on Tweets through their engagements on the Home Timeline has only been explored to a limited extent. At the same time, there is a lack of large-scale public social network datasets that would enable the scientific community to both benchmark and build more powerful and comprehensive models that tailor content to user interests. By releasing an original dataset of 160 million Tweets along with engagement information, Twitter aims to address exactly that. During this release, special attention is drawn on maintaining compliance with existing privacy laws. Apart from user privacy, this paper touches on the key challenges faced by researchers and professionals striving to predict user engagements. It further describes the key aspects of the RecSys 2020 Challenge that was organized by ACM RecSys in partnership with Twitter using this dataset.Comment: 16 pages, 2 table

PRIVAS - automatic anonymization of databases

Currently, given the technological evolution, data and information are increasingly valuable in the most diverse areas for the most various purposes. Although the information and knowledge discovered by the exploration and use of data can be very valuable in many applications, people have been increasingly concerned about the other side, that is, the privacy threats that these processes bring. The system Privas, described in this paper, will aid the Data Publisher to pre-process the database before publishing. For that, a DSL is used to define the database schema description, identify the sensitive data and the desired privacy level. After that a Privas processor will process the DSL program and interpret it to automatically transform the repository schema. The automatization of the anonymization process is the main contribution and novelty of this work.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Modeling, Predicting and Capturing Human Mobility

Realistic models of human mobility are critical for modern day applications, specifically for recommendation systems, resource planning and process optimization domains. Given the rapid proliferation of mobile devices equipped with Internet connectivity and GPS functionality today, aggregating large sums of individual geolocation data is feasible. The thesis focuses on methodologies to facilitate data-driven mobility modeling by drawing parallels between the inherent nature of mobility trajectories, statistical physics and information theory. On the applied side, the thesis contributions lie in leveraging the formulated mobility models to construct prediction workflows by adopting a privacy-by-design perspective. This enables end users to derive utility from location-based services while preserving their location privacy. Finally, the thesis presents several approaches to generate large-scale synthetic mobility datasets by applying machine learning approaches to facilitate experimental reproducibility

Personal information privacy: what's next?

In recent events, user-privacy has been a main focus for all technological and data-holding companies, due to the global interest in protecting personal information. Regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) set firm laws and penalties around the handling and misuse of user data. These privacy rules apply regardless of the data structure, whether it being structured or unstructured. In this work, we perform a summary of the available algorithms for providing privacy in structured data, and analyze the popular tools that handle privacy in textual data; namely medical data. We found that although these tools provide adequate results in terms of de-identifying medical records by removing personal identifyers (HIPAA PHI), they fall short in terms of being generalizable to satisfy nonmedical fields. In addition, the metrics used to measure the performance of these privacy algorithms don't take into account the differences in significance that every identifier has. Finally, we propose the concept of a domain-independent adaptable system that learns the significance of terms in a given text, in terms of person identifiability and text utility, and is then able to provide metrics to help find a balance between user privacy and data usability