Clustering Geo-Indistinguishability for Privacy of Continuous Location Traces

Abstract

We consider privacy of obfuscated location reports that can be correlated through time/space to estimate the real position of a user. We propose a user-centric Location Privacy-Preserving Mechanism (LPPM) that protects users not only against single reports, but also over time, against continuous reports. Our proposed mechanism, designated clustering geo-indistinguishability, creates obfuscation clusters to aggregate nearby locations into a single obfuscated location. To evaluate the utility of the mechanism, we resorted to a real use-case based on geofencing. Our evaluation results have shown a suitable privacy-utility trade-off for the proposed clustering geo-indistinguishability mechanism.