Analyzing your location data with provable privacy guarantees

Abstract

The ubiquity of smartphones and wearable devices coupled with the ability to sense locations through these devices has brought location privacy into the forefront of public debate. Location information is actively collected to help improve ad targeting, provide useful services to users (e.g., traffic prediction), or study human mobility/activity patterns and correlate them to the health of individuals. In this chapter, we highlight the privacy concerns in large-scale collections of location data from user-centric mobile devices and explain how simple cloaking based techniques might be ineffective. This motivates the need for algorithms that collect and analyze location data with formal provable privacy guarantees. We discuss the state of the art in specifying formal privacy guarantees for location data, as well as algorithms that achieve these formal privacy guarantees. We conclude with open research directions in this area.