The Impact of Anonymization on the Geosocial Network Metrics Used in Socio-economic Analysis

What is it about?

The expansion of mobile devices equipped with GPS (Global Positioning System) locators corresponds to the development of the highly customized location-based services including geosocial networks. The usage of customized location-based services positively effects many aspects of users’ daily routines from travelling to choosing the best restaurant. On the other hand, providing customized services relates to collecting and storing large amount of users’ information and gives rise to many privacy-preserving issues. In this paper, we discuss the privacy concerns connected with publishing geosocial network datasets and the impact of the anonymization on the utility of the geosocial network dataset. Considering the importance of the geosocial network for the socioeconomic analysis, we put arguments for the importance of geosocial network anonymization before exploiting the dataset. We apply the clustering anonymization methods according to geographical coordinates and the values of location entropy on the real-world data to prevent the location privacy leakage. Afterwards, we compare the network metrics in the original and anonymized real-world datasets and measure the impact of the anonymization on the metric values.

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