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Preserving location privacy using three layer RDV masking in geocoded published discrete point data

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Abstract

The prevalent usage of Location Based Services; where getting any informational service is solely based on the user’s current location, have raised an extreme concern over location privacy of the user. The privacy concern becomes paramount when the location tagged data publication like government health care data, district crime record data and the like, are reverse engineered by an adversary to pinpoint the real user against the location given in the specific tuple of the record. Address information is typically considered as a confidential element of the published record and any linkages of this piece of information with publicly available quasi identifier is enough to reveal a lot about a user (which is not apparent otherwise) or hamper the social reputation of the user considering the extreme case. Various geographical masking techniques have been presented and discussed at length in the literature, however, no scheme is able to dispense privacy providing absolute usefulness of the published data. This work is a research attempt to recognize the current state-of-the-art in geographical masking, supportive analysis of the existing masking technique, and come up with a robust solution that serves the purpose of location privacy without making published data worthless. The suggested solution is well suited for geocoded, static, discrete point published data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chandigarh University, Punjab, 140413, India

    Ruchika Gupta

  2. Computer Engineering Department, National Institute of Technology, Surat, Gujarat, 395007, India

    Udai Pratap Rao

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  1. Ruchika Gupta
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  2. Udai Pratap Rao
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Correspondence to Ruchika Gupta.

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Gupta, R., Rao, U.P. Preserving location privacy using three layer RDV masking in geocoded published discrete point data. World Wide Web 23, 175–206 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-019-00716-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-019-00716-7

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