25,934 research outputs found
Privacy and accountability for location-based aggregate statistics
A significant and growing class of location-based mobile applications aggregate position data from individual devices at a server and compute aggregate statistics over these position streams. Because these devices can be linked to the movement of individuals, there is significant danger that the aggregate computation will violate the location privacy of individuals. This paper develops and evaluates PrivStats, a system for computing aggregate statistics over location data that simultaneously achieves two properties: first, provable guarantees on location privacy even in the face of any side information about users known to the server, and second, privacy-preserving accountability (i.e., protection against abusive clients uploading large amounts of spurious data). PrivStats achieves these properties using a new protocol for uploading and aggregating data anonymously as well as an efficient zero-knowledge proof of knowledge protocol we developed from scratch for accountability. We implemented our system on Nexus One smartphones and commodity servers. Our experimental results demonstrate that PrivStats is a practical system: computing a common aggregate (e.g., count) over the data of 10,000 clients takes less than 0.46 s at the server and the protocol has modest latency (0.6 s) to upload data from a Nexus phone. We also validated our protocols on real driver traces from the CarTel project.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (grant 0931550)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (grant 0716273
Privacy-Friendly Mobility Analytics using Aggregate Location Data
Location data can be extremely useful to study commuting patterns and
disruptions, as well as to predict real-time traffic volumes. At the same time,
however, the fine-grained collection of user locations raises serious privacy
concerns, as this can reveal sensitive information about the users, such as,
life style, political and religious inclinations, or even identities. In this
paper, we study the feasibility of crowd-sourced mobility analytics over
aggregate location information: users periodically report their location, using
a privacy-preserving aggregation protocol, so that the server can only recover
aggregates -- i.e., how many, but not which, users are in a region at a given
time. We experiment with real-world mobility datasets obtained from the
Transport For London authority and the San Francisco Cabs network, and present
a novel methodology based on time series modeling that is geared to forecast
traffic volumes in regions of interest and to detect mobility anomalies in
them. In the presence of anomalies, we also make enhanced traffic volume
predictions by feeding our model with additional information from correlated
regions. Finally, we present and evaluate a mobile app prototype, called
Mobility Data Donors (MDD), in terms of computation, communication, and energy
overhead, demonstrating the real-world deployability of our techniques.Comment: Published at ACM SIGSPATIAL 201
Policing Chicago Public Schools: A Gateway to the School-to-Prison Pipeline
"Policing Chicago Public Schools: A Gateway to the School-to-Prison Pipeline" relies on data from the Chicago Police Department (CPD) to show (for the first time in seven years) the type of offenses and the demographics (gender, age and race) of the juveniles arrested on CPS properties in calendar year 2010
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