Adaptive Cloaking Region Obfuscation in Road Networks

The development of location-based services (LBS) promotes the rapid growth of location data, which also leads to an increasing threat to location privacy. Existing location obfuscation techniques focus on two-dimensional planes that may generate off-road locations. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Cloaking Region Obfuscation (ACRO) mechanism to protect vehicles’ location privacy in road networks. The proposed ACRO mechanism employs route distances to measure the indistinguishability of vehicles in road networks. The ACRO mechanism perturbs vehicle locations to obfuscated cloaking regions based on the route distance between two cloaking regions. The ACRO mechanism adaptively tunes location privacy budgets according to drivers’ privacy requirements. Comprehensive experiments confirm that the proposed ACRO mechanism effectively protects location privacy in road networks.