A risk model for privacy in trajectory data

Risk Conference Proceedings โ€บ A risk model for privacy in trajectory data
Research

A risk model for privacy in trajectory data

By Anirban Basu, Anna Monreale, Roberto Trasarti, Juan C. Corena, Fosca Giannotti, Dino Pedreschi, Shinsaku Kiyomoto, Yutaka Miyake & Tadashi Yanagihara ยท September 14, 2026
Abstract

Time sequence data relating to users, such as medical histories and mobility data, are good candidates for data mining, but often contain highly sensitive information. Different methods in privacy-preserving data publishing are utilised to release such private data so that individual records in the released data cannot be re-linked to specific users with a high degree of certainty. These methods provide theoretical worst-case privacy risks as measures of the privacy protection that they offer. However, often with many real-world data the worst-case scenario is too pessimistic and does not provide a realistic view of the privacy risks: the real probability of re-identification is often much lower than the theoretical worst-case risk. In this paper, we propose a novel empirical risk model for privacy which, in relation to the cost of privacy attacks, demonstrates better the practical risks associated with a privacy preserving data release. We show detailed evaluation of the proposed risk model by using k-anonymised real-world mobility data and then, we show how the empirical evaluation of the privacy risk has a different trend in synthetic data describing random movements.

Publication Details
Type Research
Volume 2
Issue No. 9
Published Sep 14, 2026
Open Access ๐Ÿ‘ View Paper โ†“ Download Paper
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