Local Differential Privacy Location Protection for Mobile Terminals Based on Huffman Coding

The location information of mobile terminals is closely linked to personal privacy, which may threaten users’ life and property safety if leaked. Local differential privacy model provides strict privacy protection effect, allows users to handle and protect sensitive information according to their personal needs, and avoids the dependence on third-party servers. In view of the poor flexibility on the user side and severe loss of perturbation location quality in current local differential privacy location protection methods, a local differential privacy location protection method for mobile terminals based on Huffman encoding is proposed. The mobile user submits the location privacy protection range according to personalized privacy needs, and the server side performs location encoding on demand and returns it to the user. Subsequently, the user selects the Huffman encoding of his region and performs local differential privacy perturbation on it to achieve the privacy protection of the original location. The server side determines where the user is located by decoding the received perturbed location encoding, and provides location-based services accordingly. Experiments on real location datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can provide better location availability and operational efficiency while achieving local differential privacy protection of users’ location.