• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.27 no.12
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• pp.161-169
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• 2022

With the development of mobile devices and global positioning systems, various location-based services can be utilized, which collects user's location information and provides services based on it. In this process, there is a risk of personal sensitive information being exposed to the outside, and thus Geo-indistinguishability (Geo-Ind), which protect location privacy of LBS users by perturbing their true location, is widely used. However, owing to the data perturbation mechanism of Geo-Ind, it is hard to accurately obtain the density distribution of LBS users from the collection of perturbed location data. Thus, in this paper, we aim to develop a novel method which enables to effectively compute the user density distribution from perturbed location dataset collected under Geo-Ind. In particular, the proposed method leverages Expectation-Maximization(EM) algorithm to precisely estimate the density disribution of LBS users from perturbed location dataset. Experimental results on real world datasets show that our proposed method achieves significantly better performance than a baseline approach.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.29 no.6
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• pp.69-76
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• 2024

Recent advances in sensor and mobile technologies have made it possible to collect user location data. This location information is used as a valuable asset in various industries, resulting in increased demand for location data collection and sharing. However, because location data contains sensitive user information, indiscriminate collection can lead to privacy issues. Recently, geo-indistinguishability (Geo-I), a method of differential privacy, has been widely used to protect the privacy of location data. While Geo-I is powerful in effectively protecting users' locations, it poses a problem because the utility of the collected location data decreases due to data perturbation. Therefore, this paper proposes a method using Geo-I technology to effectively collect user location data while maintaining its data utility. The proposed method utilizes the prior distribution of users to improve the overall data utility, while protecting accurate location information. Experimental results using real data show that the proposed method significantly improves the usefulness of the collected data compared to existing methods.