Safeguarding Privacy in Real-Time Trajectory Releases for AI-Driven Consumer Applications

Intelligent consumer applications optimize product recommendations by analyzing users’ real-time trajectory information and mobility patterns to gain insights into their consumption preferences. However, privacy concerns often cause individuals to hesitate when sharing their locations. This paper introduces a real-time trajectory release scheme called Dynamic Trajectory Releasing based on Geo-indistinguishability (DTRG) that ensures client-side data protection. A significant contribution of this work is the introduction of a novel concept, w-event Geo-indistinguishability, which extends the measurement of privacy for real-time trajectories. Building upon the theoretical foundation of w-event Geo-indistinguishability, we design a dynamic privacy budget allocation strategy that doesn’t require pre-setting trajectory length. This strategy recycles unused privacy budgets and progressively reallocating them in a backward cumulative manner, enhancing the utilization efficiency of the privacy budget. By incorporating users’ travel information for prediction, DTRG adaptively perturbs real locations based on prediction results. Through the collaborative operation of the Prediction Mechanism (PM), Detection Mechanism (DM) and Noisy Mechanism (NM), this approach further optimizes the utility of the budget. Experimental results demonstrate that DTRG significantly improves data availability, achieving up to a 36% increase compared to some competing algorithms while maintaining the desired level of privacy.