On the Anonymity of Periodic Location Samples

As Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers become a common feature in cell phones, personal digital assistants, and automobiles, there is a growing interest in tracking larger user populations, rather than individual users. Unfortunately, anonymous location samples do not fully solve the privacy problem. An adversary could link multiple samples (i.e., follow the footsteps) to accumulate path information and eventually identify a user. This paper reports on our ongoing work to analyze privacy risks in such applications. We observe that linking anonymous location samples is related to the data association problem in tracking systems. We then propose to use such tracking algorithms to characterize the level of privacy and to derive disclosure control algorithms.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: SPC
• Authors: Marco Gruteser, Baik Hoh
• Keywords: Anonymous Location Samples, Applied Computing, Larger User Populations, Privacy, SPC 2005