Towards Mobility Reports with User-Level Privacy

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

  • Alexandra Kapp - (Author)
  • Saskia Nuñez von Vogt - (Author)
  • Helena Mihaljević - (Author)
  • Florian Tschorsch - , Technical University of Berlin (Author)

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 languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)95-121
Number of pages27
JournalJournal of Location Based Services
Volume17
Issue number2
Early online date21 Nov 2022
Publication statusPublished - 2023
Peer-reviewedYes
Externally publishedYes

External IDs

Scopus 85142395851

Keywords

Sustainable Development Goals

Keywords

  • mobility report, exploratory data analysis, user-level privacy, Human mobility data, differential privacy