Maximizing Area Coverage in Privacy-Preserving Worker Recruitment: A Prior Knowledge-Enhanced Geo-Indistinguishable Approach

Worker recruitment for area coverage maximization, typically requires participants to upload location information, which can deter potential participation without proper protection. While existing studies resort to geo-indistinguishability to address this concern, they primarily focus on either specific task locations (Target Coverage) or operate under pre-defined recruitment quotas for an interested region (Area Coverage). These focuses not only yield suboptimal area coverage when scaled but also fail to leverage valuable prior knowledge in the form of participants’ noisy historical registered locations, to enhance both location obfuscation and worker identification processes. To address these limitations, we present WILTON, which optimizes area coverage under geo-indistinguishability by recruiting the minimum number of participants through the strategic utilization of noisy prior knowledge. In WILTON, to generate obfuscated locations, we propose a probabilistic and weight-aware input perturbation mechanism, which groups and weights prior locations rather than using only personal prior locations. To privately identify the recruited workers, we design a grid-based worker identification method, which provides a worst-case performance guarantee of ratio $1 - \frac {1}{e}$ to the optimum. We provide a theoretical analysis of the privacy, utility, and complexity guarantees of WILTON. Experimental results over two real-world datasets and one synthetic dataset show that WILTON surpasses the state-of-the-arts by at least 8% in area coverage improvement.