Claudio Bettini – författare

This handbook covers the fundamental principles and theory, and the state-of-the-art research, systems and applications, in the area of mobility data privacy. It is primarily addressed to computer science and statistics researchers and educators, who are interested in topics related to mobility privacy. This handbook will also be valuable to industry developers, as it explains the state-of-the-art algorithms for offering privacy. By discussing a wide range of privacy techniques, providing in-depth coverage of the most important ones, and highlighting promising avenues for future research, this handbook also aims at attracting computer science and statistics students to this interesting field of research.

The advances in mobile devices and positioning technologies, together with the progress in spatiotemporal database research, have made possible the tracking of mobile devices (and their human companions) at very high accuracy, while supporting the efficient storage ofmobility data in data warehouses, which this handbook illustrates. This has provided the means to collect, store and process mobility data of an unprecedented quantity, quality and timeliness. As ubiquitous computing pervades our society, user mobility data represents a very useful but also extremely sensitive source of information. On one hand, the movement traces that are left behind by the mobile devices of the users can be very useful in a wide spectrum of applications such as urban planning, traffic engineering, and environmental pollution management. On the other hand, the disclosure of mobility data to third parties may severely jeopardize the privacy of the users whose movement is recorded, leading to abuse scenarios such as user tailing and profiling.

 A significant amount of research work has been conducted in the last 15 years in the area of mobility data privacy and important research directions, such as privacy-preserving mobility data management, privacy inlocation sensing technologies and location-based services, privacy in vehicular communication networks, privacy in location-based social networks, privacy in participatory sensing systems which this handbook addresses.. This handbook  also identifies important privacy gaps in the use of mobility data and has resulted to the adoption of international laws for location privacy protection (e.g., in EU, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore), as well as to a large number of interesting technologies for privacy-protecting mobility data, some of which have been made available through open-source systems and featured in real-world applications.

Location-based applications refer to those that use location data in a prominent manner. Location data can be very effective for service provisioning, enabling the birth of a new generation of information services. Although data security and privacy issues have been extensively investigated in several domains, current techniques are not readily applicable to location-based applications. Conciliating the effectiveness of these applications with privacy concerns constitutes a unique challenge, mostly due to the semantic richness of location and time information. Research in this field involves aspects of spatio-temporal reasoning, query processing, system security, statistical inference, and more importantly, anonymization techniques. Several research groups have been working in recent years to identify privacy attacks and defense techniques in this domain.

This state-of-the-art survey provides a solid ground for researchers approaching this topic to understand current achievements through a common categorization of privacy threats and defense techniques. This objective is particularly challenging considering the specific (and often implicit) assumptions that characterize the recent literature on privacy in location-based services.

The book also illustrates the many facets that make the study of this topic a particularly interesting research subject, including topics that go beyond privacy preserving transformations of service requests, and include access control, privacy preserving publishing of moving object data, privacy in the use of specific positioning technology, and privacy in vehicular network applications.