A Tolerance-Degree-Based Sensitive Area Division Method for Improving Location Privacy Protection of Smart Terminal

Due to the subjective nature of sensitive area radius, the effectiveness of current privacy protection strategies is often quite poor. To address this issue, a sensitive area radius design method of smart terminal is proposed by considering the total privacy budget and tolerance degree of adversary inference capabilities. With the increase in the tolerance degree of adversary’s inference capabilities, the sensitive area radius decreases. Based on the division results of the sensitive area, the privacy budgets of smart terminals are allocated separately. Then, a location data perturbation strategy is designed based on the allocated privacy budget and location encoding. Compared with the existing privacy protection strategies, the proposed method is more reasonable, which can improve the effectiveness of location privacy protection strategy. Finally, experimental results based on the real-world dataset show that the proposed algorithm can enhance data utility by 40%.