Perturb and optimize users’ location privacy using geo-indistinguishability and location semantics

Abstract Location-based services (LBS) are capable of providing location-based information retrieval, traffic navigation, entertainment services, emergency rescues, and several similar services primarily on the premise of the geographic location of users or mobile devices. However, in the process of introducing a new user experience, it is also easy to expose users’ specific location which can result in more private information leakage. Hence, the protection of location privacy remains one of the critical issues of the location-based services. Moreover, the areas where humans work and live have different location semantics and sensitivities according to their different social functions. Although the privacy protection of a user’s real location can be achieved by the perturbation algorithm, the attackers may employ the semantics information of the perturbed location to infer a user’s real location semantics in an attempt to spy on a user’s privacy to certain extent. In order to mitigate the above semantics inference attack, and further improve the quality of the location-based services, this paper hereby proposes a user side location perturbation and optimization algorithm based on geo-indistinguishability and location semantics. The perturbation area satisfying geo-indistinguishability is thus generated according to the planar Laplace mechanism and optimized by combining the semantics information and time characteristics of the location. The optimum perturbed location that is able to satisfy the minimum loss of location-based service quality is selected via a linear programming method, and can be employed to replace the real location of the user so as to prevent the leakage of the privacy. Experimental comparison of the actual road network and location semantics dataset manifests that the proposed method reduces approximately 37% perturbation distance in contrast to the other state-of-the-art methods, maintains considerably lower similarity of location semantics, and improves region counting query accuracy by a margin of around 40%.