Local Differential Privacy for correlated location data release in ITS

The ubiquity of location positioning devices has facilitated the implementation of various Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) applications that generate an enormous volume of location data. Recently, Local Differential Privacy (LDP) has been proposed as a rigorous privacy framework that permits the continuous release of aggregate location statistics without relying on a trusted data curator. However, the conventional LDP was built upon the assumption of independent data, which may not be suitable for inherently correlated location data. This paper investigates the quantification of potential privacy leakage in a correlated location data release scenario under a local setting, which has not been addressed in the literature. Our analysis shows that the privacy guarantee of LDP could be degraded in the presence of spatial–temporal and user correlations, albeit the perturbation is performed locally and independently by the users. This privacy guarantee is bounded by a privacy barrier that is affected by the intensity of correlations. We derive several important closed-form expressions and design efficient algorithms to compute such privacy leakage in a correlated location data. We subsequently propose a $\Delta$-CLDP model that enhances the conventional LDP by incorporating the data correlations, and design a generic LDP data release framework that renders adaptive personalization of privacy preservation. Extensive theoretical analyses and simulations on scalable real datasets validate the security and performance efficiency of our work.