Privacy Protection Method for Cellular Signaling Data Based on Genetic Algorithm
Publication: Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part A: Systems
Volume 149, Issue 4
Abstract
Cellular signaling data (CSD) is a new data source of intelligent transportation and has great potential in the study of human mobility. However, research recently has shown that the privacy of individual trajectories of travelers can be easily leaked due to their unique travel patterns, which will lead to the disclosure of a traveler’s trajectory privacy. To address this issue, the risk of privacy leakage in a CSD data set was quantitatively measured due to reidentification attacks. To reduce the risk of trajectory privacy leakage, a spatial generalization method based on an improved genetic algorithm (IGA) was proposed. We transformed the base station aggregation problem that meets the k-anonymity requirement into a shortest path problem. The data utility loss after privacy preservation was evaluated based on origin–destination (OD) flow analysis of traffic analysis zones (TAZs). Finally, the relationships between privacy preservation and data utility were revealed. In all of the cases, more privacy protection corresponded to less data utility. The discovered relationships provide useful guidance for data publishers on how to choose the right tradeoff between privacy protection and data utility when publishing or sharing such sensitive data.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by the National Key R&D Program of China under Grant No. 2020YFB1600400, in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 12002403 and U1811463), in part by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, Sun Yat-sen University (Grant No. 2021qntd08).
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Information & Authors
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Published In
Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part A: Systems
Volume 149 • Issue 4 • April 2023
Copyright
© 2023 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Nov 15, 2021
Accepted: Nov 7, 2022
Published online: Jan 28, 2023
Published in print: Apr 1, 2023
Discussion open until: Jun 28, 2023
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