On location privacy and quality of information in participatory sensing

Abstract

Participatory sensing applications typically bind sensor data to locations. Location privacy preserving mechanisms protecting the location of users introduce therefore an uncertainty in the collected data distributions. We consider two strategies to reconstruct a data distribution after k-anonymity has been applied to the users' location information. We investigate how different parameters for the location privacy preserving mechanism influence both the quality of information and the location privacy of the users. Our results show that the cloak area resulted from applying k-anonymity has a higher impact on both the quality of information and the location privacy than the number of users, k, that are cloaked together. Copyright 2012 ACM.