Uncertainty for anonymity and 2-dimensional range query distortion

Abstract

In this work, we study the problem of anonymity-preserving data publishing in moving objects databases. In particular, the trajectory of a mobile user on the plane is no longer a polyline in a two-dimensional space, instead it is a two-dimensional surface: we know that the trajectory of the mobile user is within this surface, but we do not know exactly where. We transform the surface's boundary poly-lines to dual points and we focus on the information distortion introduced by this space translation. We develop a set of efficient spatio-temporal access methods and we experimentally measure the impact of information distortion by comparing the performance results of the same spatio-temporal range queries executed on the original database and on the anonymized one. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.