Kijung Jung  Hyukki Lee  Yon Dohn Chung

10.5626/JOK.2022.49.4.305

data privacy Local Differential Privacy Hidden Markov Model Time-Series Data

As the prevalence of smart devices that can generate location data, the number of location-based services is exploding. Since the user’s location data are sensitive information, if the original data are utilized in their original form, the privacy of individuals could be breached. In this study, we proposed a time-series location data collection and analysis method that satisfies local differential privacy, which is a strong privacy model for the data collection environment and considers the characteristics of time-series location data. In the data collection process, the location of an individual is expressed as a bit array. After that, each bit of the array is perturbed by randomized responses for privacy preservation. In the data analysis process, we analyzed the location frequency using hidden Markov model. Moreover, we performed additional spatiotemporal correlation analysis, which is not possible in the existing analysis methods. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed method, we generated trajectory data based on the Seoul subway and analyzed the results of our method.