A decentralised approach to privacy preserving trajectory mining

Large volumes of mobility data is collected in various application domains. Enterprise applications are designed on the notion of centralised data control where the proprietary of the data rests with the enterprise and not with the user. This has consequences as evident by the occasional privacy breaches. Trajectory mining is an important data mining problem, however, trajectory data can disclose sensitive location information about users. In this work, we propose a decentralised blockchain-enabled privacy-preserving trajectory data mining framework where the proprietary of the data rests with the user and not with the enterprise. We formalise the privacy preservation in trajectory data mining settings, present a proposal for privacy preservation, and implement the solution as a proof-of-concept. A comprehensive experimental evaluation is conducted to assess the applicability of the system. The results show that the proposed system yields promising results for blockchain-enabled privacy preservation in user trajectory data. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.