Differential Privacy-Based Location and Trajectory Data Protection for Utility-Preserving Location-Based Services

The widespread use of location-based services (LBSs) has led to the continuous collection of user location and trajectory data, increasing the risk of privacy leakage and creating a persistent tradeoff between privacy protection and data utility. To address this problem in discrete location query scenarios, this paper proposes a single-point location privacy protection method based on Q-R tree retrieval and differential privacy, termed QRDPP. QRDPP combines the adaptive spatial partitioning capability of a Q-tree with the minimum bounding rectangle (MBR)-based indexing capability of an R-tree. It applies an improved geometric privacy budget allocation strategy to leaf nodes and an arithmetic allocation strategy to non-leaf nodes, followed by Laplace perturbation of the corresponding location data and node information. For continuous trajectory query scenarios, this paper proposes a spatiotemporal generalization and differential privacy method, termed STG-DPTP, to address inadequate temporal protection, inappropriate generalization, and trajectory distortion. STG-DPTP performs hierarchical spatiotemporal clustering, separately models temporal and spatial distributions using Gaussian kernel density estimation, dynamically optimizes bandwidth parameters through Bayesian optimization, selects representative candidate subsets using the exponential mechanism, and generates protected trajectories through constrained sampling. Experiments on the GeoLife dataset evaluate the proposed methods in terms of query accuracy, computational efficiency, spatial trajectory similarity, reconstruction error, adversarial uncertainty, and temporal preservation. The results show that QRDPP improves the utility and efficiency of privacy-preserving spatial queries, while STG-DPTP better preserves the spatial distribution, trajectory structure, and temporal characteristics of the original data under the adopted differential privacy framework.