Beyond Points and Paths: Counting Private Bodies

Abstract

Mining of spatial data is an enabling technology for mobile services, Internet-connected cars, and the Internet of Things. But the very distinctiveness of spatial data that drives utility, comes at the cost of user privacy. In this work, we continue the tradition of privacy-preserving spatial analytics, focusing not on point or path data, but on planar spatial regions. Such data represents the area of a user's most frequent visitation - such as 'around home and nearby shops'. Specifically we consider the differentially-private release of data structures that support range queries for counting users' spatial regions. Counting planar regions leads to unique challenges not faced in existing wor..