Towards achieving geo‐indistinguishability for 3D GPS location: A 3D Laplace mechanism approach

Abstract

SummaryAs the scope of human exploration continues to expand from land to space and the oceans, location‐based data analysis and services are facing unprecedented opportunities and challenges. The wide application of various services based on spatial location in the fields of medical, transportation, financial, social and so forth not only provides great convenience but also exposes the disadvantages of location privacy leakage. Most present location privacy protection solutions are only relevant to 2D locations. However, with the widespread use of positioning‐enabled aircraft, sensing devices and acquisition equipment, there is an urgent need to achieve privacy protection for 3D spatial location data. Therefore, this article proposes a 3D geo‐indistinguishability perturbation method for 3D GPS Locations. The suggested approach calculates GPS coordinate perturbation accurately using the 3D Laplace mechanism, allowing for point‐to‐point perturbation while protecting the privacy of 3D spatial GPS coordinates. Experimental examination of real spatial location datasets demonstrates that the proposed 3D spatial location perturbation method outperforms other existing methods in terms of location service quality loss, data availability, and operational efficiency with the same privacy budget.