Preserving privacy of agents in participatory-sensing schemes for traffic estimation

Abstract

A measure of privacy infringement for agents (or participants) travelling across a transportation network in participatory-sensing schemes for traffic estimation is introduced. The measure is defined to be the conditional probability that an external observer assigns to the private nodes in the transportation network, e.g., location of home or office, given all the position measurements that it broadcasts over time. An algorithm for finding an optimal trade-off between the measure of privacy infringement and the expected estimation error, captured by the number of the nodes over which the participant stops broadcasting its position, is proposed. The algorithm searches over a family of polici..