Trajectory personalization privacy preservation method based on multi-sensitivity attribute generalization and local suppression

Fast-developing mobile location-aware services generate an enormous volume of trajectory data while adding value to people’s lives. However, trajectory data contains not only location information, but also sensitive personal information. If the original trajectory data is published directly, it could result in serious privacy leaks. Most of the existing privacy-preserving trajectory publishing methods only protect the location information or set the same privacy preservation levels for all moving objects. To meet the users’ personalized privacy requirements and ensure the utility of trajectory location and sensitive information, we propose a trajectory personalized privacy preservation method based on multi-sensitivity attribute generalization and local suppression. First, we set different security levels for each trajectory by calculating the correlation between sensitive attributes to establish a sensitive attribute classification tree. Second, we generalized sensitive attributes based on privacy preservation levels for each trajectory, the trajectory data still at risk of privacy leakage after generalization was locally suppressed. Finally, an anonymized trajectory dataset was generated. Experimental results on real datasets demonstrated that our method could improve data availability while preserving privacy.