Privacy-Aware Knowledge Discovery from Location Data

Abstract

Spatio-temporal, geo-referenced datasets are growing rapidly, and will be more in the near future. This phenomenon is mostly due to the daily collection of telecommunication data from mobile phones and other location-aware devices and is expected to enable novel classes of applications based on the extraction of behavioral patterns from mobility data. Such patterns could be used for instance in traffic and sustainable mobility management (e.g., to study the accessibility to services), urban planning, environmental monitoring, and collaborative location-based services. Clearly, in these applications privacy is a concern, since some knowledge may be sensitive, or an over-specific pattern may reveal the behaviour of groups of few individual. In this paper we focus on automated privacy-preserving methods we developed for extracting and sharing user- consumable forms of knowledge from large amounts of raw data referenced in space and in time.