Towards Mobility Reports with User-Level Privacy
Research output: Contribution to journal › Research article › Contributed › peer-review
Contributors
Abstract
The importance of human mobility analyses is growing in both research and practice, especially as applications for urban planning and mobility rely on them. Aggregate statistics and visualizations play an essential role as building blocks of data explorations and summary reports, the latter being increasingly released to third parties such as municipal administrations or in the context of citizen participation. However, such explorations already pose a threat to privacy as they reveal potentially sensitive location information, and thus should not be shared without further privacy measures. There is a substantial gap between state-of-the-art research on privacy methods and their utilization in practice. We thus conceptualize a mobility report with differential privacy guarantees and implement it as open-source software to enable a privacy-preserving exploration of key aspects of mobility data in an easily accessible way. Moreover, we evaluate the benefits of limiting user contributions using three data sets relevant to research and practice. Our results show that even a strong limit on user contribution alters the original geospatial distribution only within a comparatively small range, while significantly reducing the error introduced by adding noise to achieve privacy guarantees.
Details
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 95-121 |
Number of pages | 27 |
Journal | Journal of Location Based Services |
Volume | 17 |
Issue number | 2 |
Early online date | 21 Nov 2022 |
Publication status | Published - 2023 |
Peer-reviewed | Yes |
Externally published | Yes |
External IDs
Scopus | 85142395851 |
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Keywords
Sustainable Development Goals
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Keywords
- mobility report, exploratory data analysis, user-level privacy, Human mobility data, differential privacy