Movement data anonymity through generalization

In recent years, spatio-temporal and moving objects databases have gained considerable interest, due to the diffusion of mobile devices (e.g., mobile phones, RFID devices and GPS devices) and of new applications, where the discovery of consumable, concise, and applicable knowledge is the key step. Clearly, in these applications privacy is a concern, since models extracted from this kind of data can reveal the behavior of group of individuals, thus compromising their privacy. Movement data present a new challenge for the privacy-preserving data mining community because of their spatial and temporal characteristics. In this position paper we briefly present an approach for the generalization of movement data that can be adopted for obtaining k-anonymity in spatio-temporal datasets; specifically, it can be used to realize a framework for publishing of spatio-temporal data while preserving privacy. We ran a preliminary set of experiments on a real-world trajectory dataset, demonstrating that this method of generalization of trajectories preserves the clustering analysis results.