TY - GEN
T1 - Reconstructing spatial distributions from anonymized locations
AU - Horey, James
AU - Forrest, Stephanie
AU - Groat, Michael
PY - 2012
Y1 - 2012
N2 - Devices such as mobile phones, tablets, and sensors are often equipped with GPS that accurately report a person's location. Combined with wireless communication, these devices enable a wide range of new social tools and applications. These same qualities, however, leave location-aware applications vulnerable to privacy violations. This paper introduces the Negative Quad Tree, a privacy protection method for location aware applications. The method is broadly applicable to applications that use spatial density information, such as social applications that measure the popularity of social venues. The method employs a simple anonymization algorithm running on mobile devices, and a more complex reconstruction algorithm on a central server. This strategy is well suited to low-powered mobile devices. The paper analyzes the accuracy of the reconstruction method in a variety of simulated and real-world settings and demonstrates that the method is accurate enough to be used in many realworld scenarios.
AB - Devices such as mobile phones, tablets, and sensors are often equipped with GPS that accurately report a person's location. Combined with wireless communication, these devices enable a wide range of new social tools and applications. These same qualities, however, leave location-aware applications vulnerable to privacy violations. This paper introduces the Negative Quad Tree, a privacy protection method for location aware applications. The method is broadly applicable to applications that use spatial density information, such as social applications that measure the popularity of social venues. The method employs a simple anonymization algorithm running on mobile devices, and a more complex reconstruction algorithm on a central server. This strategy is well suited to low-powered mobile devices. The paper analyzes the accuracy of the reconstruction method in a variety of simulated and real-world settings and demonstrates that the method is accurate enough to be used in many realworld scenarios.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84869022514&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84869022514&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ICDEW.2012.82
DO - 10.1109/ICDEW.2012.82
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84869022514
SN - 9780769547480
T3 - Proceedings - 2012 IEEE 28th International Conference on Data Engineering Workshops, ICDEW 2012
SP - 243
EP - 250
BT - Proceedings - 2012 IEEE 28th International Conference on Data Engineering Workshops, ICDEW 2012
T2 - 2012 IEEE 28th International Conference on Data Engineering Workshops, ICDEW 2012
Y2 - 1 April 2012 through 5 April 2012
ER -