Differentially Private Location Recommendations in Geosocial Networks

Abstract

Location-tagged social media have an increasingly important role in shaping behavior of individuals. With the help of location recommendations, users are able to learn about events, products or places of interest that are relevant to their preferences. User locations and movement patterns are available from geosocial networks such as Foursquare, mass transit logs or traffic monitoring systems. However, disclosing movement data raises serious privacy concerns, as the history of visited locations can reveal sensitive details about an individual's health status, alternative lifestyle, etc. In this paper, we investigate mechanisms to sanitize location data used in recommendations with the help of differential privacy. We also identify the main factors that must be taken into account to improve accuracy. Extensive experimental results on real-world datasets show that a careful choice of differential privacy technique leads to satisfactory location recommendation results.