Alexandra Kapp

I am happy to announce that I finished and published my dissertation!

Privacy-Preserving Analytics of Human Mobility Data –
Investigating the Gap between State-Of-The-Art Privacy Methods and Real-Life Utility Requirements

Abstract:
In recent years, human mobility data has been increasingly collected and stored, mainly due to the ubiquitous use of smartphones, producing a constant stream of cellular network and GPS data. This provides an unprecedented resource for useful applications in various fields, such as urban and traffic planning or disaster response. At the same time, as more and more data becomes available, individuals’ privacy is increasingly at risk. As a result, there is a growing body of research on privacy-enhancing technologies. Such methods, however, come with an inherent utility-privacy trade-off, where the usefulness of the data is traded for privacy. State-of-the-art techniques like methods ensuring differential privacy are not (yet) applied to a large extent in practical settings. This thesis examines privacy-preserving technologies for human mobility data in terms of their usefulness for modeling and analysis projects, with a particular focus on real-world practices. A differentially private mobility data report is proposed to serve practitioners as a tool to provide typical mobility data statistics with high privacy standards. Synthetic data generation methods are explored in-depth and can thus far not be recommended for usage in practice. For this purpose, existing methods for evaluating the utility of synthetic or otherwise privacy-enhanced mobility data are critically reviewed with regard to their suitability for various application scenarios and supplemented by more practice-relevant measures. Analytics of mobility data in a privacy-preserving manner remains an ongoing issue requiring context-specific solutions.

You can download the full thesis here:
https://tud.qucosa.de/landing-page/https%3A%2F%2Ftud.qucosa.de%2Fapi%2Fqucosa%253A94947%2Fmets%2F/

Submitted: 31.07.2024
Defended: 09.12.2024
Published: 14.01.2025