On Location and Trace Privacy of the Moving Object Using the Negative Survey

In recent years, with the widespread use of mobile applications based on location services, more and more users have begun to worry about the privacy leakage of their locations and traces. To address this problem, a variety of location-privacy protection techniques and corresponding location-privacy metrics have been proposed. The negative survey is a novel privacy-protection approach inspired by the biological immune system, which has been applied to protect the location privacy of the moving object. However, no theoretical analysis has been conducted on the effectiveness of the negative survey for location and trace privacy protection. In this paper, we theoretically analyze the effectiveness of both the single-selection negative survey and the multiple-selection negative survey for location- and trace-privacy protection. We prove that the location and trace privacy of the moving object can be well protected by the single-selection negative survey. Moreover, for the multiple-selection negative survey, we give the secure lengths of the location privacy and trace privacy, within which the location and trace privacy of the moving object can be guaranteed, respectively.