RoPriv: Road Network-Aware Privacy-Preserving Framework in Spatial Crowdsourcing

Spatial Crowdsourcing (SC) has been an indispensable Location-based Service where the SC server assigns tasks to workers based on the locations of task requesters and workers, raising strong privacy concerns. Limited by the computational and time complexity, existing works prefer differential privacy-based methods to protect location privacy. However, most differential privacy-based works ignore the road network, perturbing locations on two-dimensional plane, resulting in more failures in tasks and moreover extensive privacy disclosure in practice. This paper aims to implement a multi-task assignment with both high utility and efficiency while protecting the location privacy of both task requesters and workers on road networks. Specifically, we design a Road Network-aware Exponential Mechanism and propose an Obfuscated Locations Selection algorithm to guarantee location privacy of all participants and extensive privacy. Then, we propose region distance. Based on this, we further formulate multi-task assignment as a Binary Linear Programming problem and a utility-aware optimization problem. We solve the first problem to obtain optimal efficiency and then propose a utility-aware optimization algorithm for the second problem to improve the utility. Our experiments demonstrate sufficient and stable privacy guarantee and the well-performance on both utility and efficiency of our framework.

I. Introduction

With the development of mobile devices and GPS positioning, Spatial Crowdsourcing (SC) [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16] has become an indispensable Location-based Service in people's lives, such as ride-hailing services (e.g., Uber, Didi), food delivery (e.g., Grubhub, Meituan) [17], [18]. In the SC system, multiple tasks containing locations are sent to the SC server by task requesters. Then, based on workers’ locations, the SC server assigns these tasks to multiple suitable workers and these assigned workers need to complete corresponding tasks on time.