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The growing popularity of location-based systems, allowing unknown/untrusted servers to easily collect huge amounts of information regarding users' location, has recently started raising serious privacy concerns. In this paper we study…
With the increasing popularity of GPS-enabled hand-held devices, location-based applications and services have access to accurate and real-time location information, raising serious privacy concerns for their millions of users. Trying to…
With the tremendous increase in the number of smart phones, app stores have been overwhelmed with applications requiring geo-location access in order to provide their users better services through personalization. Revealing a user's…
Location entropy (LE) is a popular metric for measuring the popularity of various locations (e.g., points-of-interest). Unlike other metrics computed from only the number of (unique) visits to a location, namely frequency, LE also captures…
Users of location-based services (LBSs) are highly vulnerable to privacy risks since they need to disclose, at least partially, their locations to benefit from these services. One possibility to limit these risks is to obfuscate the…
The framework of differential privacy protects an individual's privacy while publishing query responses on congregated data. In this work, a new noise addition mechanism for differential privacy is introduced where the noise added is…
Conventionally, in a differentially private additive noise mechanism, independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) noise samples are added to each coordinate of the response. In this work, we formally present the addition of noise that…
Radio maps that describe spatial variations in wireless signal strength are widely used to optimize networks and support aerial platforms. Their construction requires location-labeled signal measurements from distributed users, raising…
Driven by an increasing prevalence of trackers, ever more IoT sensors, and the declining cost of computing power, geospatial information has come to play a pivotal role in contemporary predictive models. While enhancing prognostic…
We consider the geo-indistinguishability approach to location privacy, and the trade-off with respect to utility. We show that, given a desired degree of geo-indistinguishability, it is possible to construct a mechanism that minimizes the…
In the highly interconnected realm of Internet of Things, exchange of sensitive information raises severe privacy concerns. The Laplace mechanism -- adding Laplace-distributed artificial noise to sensitive data -- is one of the widely used…
Differential privacy is the state-of-the-art formal definition for data release under strong privacy guarantees. A variety of mechanisms have been proposed in the literature for releasing the output of numeric queries (e.g., the Laplace…
Since its proposal in 2013, geo-indistinguishability has been consolidated as a formal notion of location privacy, generating a rich body of literature building on this idea. A problem with most of these follow-up works is that they blindly…
In recent years, concerns about location privacy are increasing with the spread of location-based services (LBSs). Many methods to protect location privacy have been proposed in the past decades. Especially, perturbation methods based on…
We adapt the canonical Laplace mechanism, widely used in differentially private data analysis, to achieve near instance optimality with respect to the hardness of the underlying dataset. In particular, we construct a piecewise Laplace…
With the wide adoption of handheld devices (e.g. smartphones, tablets) a large number of location-based services (also called LBSs) have flourished providing mobile users with real-time and contextual information on the move. Accounting for…
Concerns on location privacy frequently arise with the rapid development of GPS enabled devices and location-based applications. While spatial transformation techniques such as location perturbation or generalization have been studied…
With recent advancements in technology, the threats of privacy violations of individuals' sensitive data are surging. Location data, in particular, have been shown to carry a substantial amount of sensitive information. A standard method to…
Location data is collected from users continuously to understand their mobility patterns. Releasing the user trajectories may compromise user privacy. Therefore, the general practice is to release aggregated location datasets. However,…
We study elliptical distributions in locally convex vector spaces, and determine conditions when they can or cannot be used to satisfy differential privacy (DP). A requisite condition for a sanitized statistical summary to satisfy DP is…