M.S. Thesis Defense - Girish Lingappa

Date: 04 Dec, 2008
Time: 8:30 AM
Location: 223 Atanasoff Hall
Topic: Anonymity-Preserving Location Data Publishing
Major Professor(s): Ying Cai


Abstract:

The advances in wireless communication and positioning technology have made it possible to identify a user's location and hence collect large volumes of personal location data. While such data is useful to many organizations, making them publicly accessible is generally prohibited, because location data may imply sensitive private information. This thesis investigates the challenges of publishing location data while preserving the location privacy of data subjects. Since location data itself may lead to subject re-identification, simply removing user identity of location data is not sufficient for anonymity preservation. We provide a literature survey of related work on this problem and discuss their limitations. We then propose a novel location depersonalization technique for efficient depersonalization of large volumes of location data. The proposed technique is evaluated using simulation. Our study shows that it is able to guarantee a desired level of anonymity protection while allowing location data to be published as accurate as possible.