Time-Efficient Geo-Obfuscation to Protect Worker Location Privacy over Road Networks in Spatial Crowdsourcing

To promote cost-effective task assignment in Spatial Crowdsourcing (SC), workers are required to report their location to servers, which raises serious privacy concerns. As a solution, geo-obfuscation has been widely used to protect the location privacy of SC workers, where workers are allowed to report perturbed location instead of the true location. Yet, most existing geo-obfuscation methods consider workers' mobility on a 2 dimensional (2D) plane, wherein workers can move in arbitrary directions. Unfortunately, 2D-based geo-obfuscation is likely to generate high traveling cost for task assignment over roads, as it cannot accurately estimate the traveling costs distortion caused by location obfuscation. In this paper, we tackle the SC worker location privacy problem over road networks. Considering the network-constrained mobility features of workers, we describe workers' mobility by a weighted directed graph, which considers the dynamic traffic condition and road network topology. Based on the graph model, we design a geo-obfuscation (GO) function for workers to maximize the workers' overall location privacy without compromising the task assignment efficiency. We formulate the problem of deriving the optimal GO function as a linear programming (LP) problem. By using the angular block structure of the LP's constraint matrix, we apply Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition to improve the time-efficiency of the GO function generation. Our experimental results in the real-trace driven simulation and the real-world experiment demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in terms of both privacy and task assignment efficiency.