Structured Sparsity Model Based Trajectory Tracking Using Private Location Data Release

Mobile devices have been an integral part of our everyday lives. Users’ increasing interaction with mobile devices brings in significant concerns on various types of potential privacy leakage, among which location privacy draws the most attention. Specifically, mobile users’ trajectories constructed by location data may be captured by adversaries to infer sensitive information. In previous studies, differential privacy has been utilized to protect published trajectory data with rigorous privacy guarantee. Strong protection provided by differential privacy distorts the original locations or trajectories using stochastic noise to avoid privacy leakage. In this article, we propose a novel location inference attack framework, iTracker, which simultaneously recovers multiple trajectories from differentially private trajectory data using the structured sparsity model. Compared with the traditional recovery methods based on single trajectory prediction, iTracker, which takes advantage of the correlation among trajectories discovered by the structured sparsity model, is more effective in recovering multiple private trajectories simultaneously. iTracker successfully attacks the existing privacy protection mechanisms based on differential privacy. We theoretically demonstrate the near-linear runtime of iTracker, and the experimental results using two real-world datasets show that iTracker outperforms existing recovery algorithms in recovering multiple trajectories.