Privacy-protected statistics publication over social media user trajectory streams

Abstract

An increasing amount of user location information is being generated due to the widespread use of social network applications and the ubiquitous adoption of mobile and wearable technologies. This data can be analysed to identify precise trajectories of individuals — where they went and when they were there. This is an obvious privacy issue, yet publication of real-time aggregate over such location streams can provide valuable resources for researchers and government agencies, e.g., in case of pandemics it would be very useful to identify who might have come into contact with an infected individual at a given time. Differential privacy techniques have become popular and widely adopted to addr..