Semantic-aware location privacy preservation on road networks

In this paper, we address the topic of location privacy preservation of mobile users on road networks. Most existing techniques of privacy preservation rely on structure-based spatial cloaking, but pay little attention to location semantic information. Yet, location semantic information may disclose sensitive information about mobile users. Thus, we propose CloSed, a semantic-awareness privacy preservation model to protect users’ privacy from violation. We design cloaked sets that should cover different semantic regions of road networks as well as satisfy quality of service (QoS). As the problem of calculating the optimal cloaked set is NP-hard, we design a greedy algorithm that balances QoS and privacy requirements. Extensive experiments evaluations demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed algorithm in providing privacy guarantees on large real-world datasets.