Mobile Semantic-Aware Trajectory for Personalized Location Privacy Preservation

Synthesizing a fake trajectory with consistent lifestyle and meaningful mobility as the actual one is the most popular way to protect the location privacy in trajectory sharing. Recent location privacy preservation shows a strong personalized requirement from the mobile semantics between users and locations. However, the existing techniques cannot fully satisfy such personalized requirements, resulting in either overprotection or underprotection. It remains open to characterize and quantify the personalized requirement for location privacy preservation. In this article, we propose a mobile semantic-aware privacy model, named MSP. Specifically, we first characterize a new kind of user-related mobile semantic on-location set by constructing a hierarchical semantic tree, according to the user’s roles at locations. Then, a dedicated approach is proposed to evaluate the location’s privacy sensitivity and integrate it into the user-related mobile semantic. Finally, an adaptive privacy-preserving mechanism, MSP, is developed, fully considering the personalized requirement from both the user and the location. With this model in place, mobile semantic-aware synthetic trajectories are constructed adaptively. Extensive experiments with a real-world data set demonstrate that our MSP model can achieve an effective and flexible balance between the personalized privacy preservation and the data availability of synthetic trajectories.