Protecting personal trajectories of social media users through differential privacy

Abstract

Road traffic congestion is an important issue in modern cities, however most existing traffic jam identification solutions are based on expensive facilities such as sensors or transport probe infrastructure with high deployment and management costs. As a result of the cost, such solutions are not ubiquitously deployed. The extensive use of smart mobile devices furnished with location-based competencies and the global popularity of microblogging applications like Twitter offers an opportunity to tackle these problems. Twitter users can serve as human traffic sensors providing real-time reflections of current traffic situations. However, these data can contain extensive personal privacy inform..