Platial k-Anonymity: Improving Location Anonymity Through Temporal Popularity Signatures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While it is increasingly necessary in today’s digital society, sharing personal location information comes at a cost. Sharing one’s precise place of interest, e.g., Compass Coffee, enables a range of location-based services, but substantially reduces the individual’s privacy. Methods have been developed to obfuscate and anonymize location data while still maintaining a degree of utility. One such approach, spatial k-anonymity, aims to ensure an individual’s level of anonymity by reporting their location as a set of k potential locations rather than their actual location alone. Larger values of k increase spatial anonymity while decreasing the utility of the location information. Typical examples of spatial k-anonymized datasets present elements as simple geographic points with no attributes or contextual information. In this work, we demonstrate that the addition of publicly available contextual data can significantly reduce the anonymity of a k-anonymized dataset. Through the analysis of place type temporal visitation patterns, hours of operation, and popularity values, one’s anonymity can be decreased by more than 50 percent. We propose a platial k-anonymity approach that leverages a combination of temporal popularity signatures and reports the amount that k must increase in order to maintain a certain level of anonymity. Finally, a method for reporting platial k-anonymous regions is presented and the implications of our methods are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.052 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".