A privacy preserving querying mechanism with high utility for electric vehicles
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With the recent rise in awareness about advancing towards a sustainable future, electric vehicles (EVs) are becoming more popular. As there are way fewer charging stations than EVs, range anxiety plays a major role in the rising number of queries made by EVs along their journeys to find the nearest available charging station, and such online querying is handled by third-party service providers and communicated via the Edge cloud. On the other hand, with the recent drive towards an information-based society, the use of personal data in various analytics is surging like never before. Hence, the risk of privacy violation of data is also increasing. One of the recently popularised methods formalising utility-preserving location privacy is geo-indistinguishability, a generalisation of the local differential privacy, which is the state-of-the-art standard for privacy protection. However, the noise should be calibrated carefully, taking into account the implications for potential utility-loss for the users affecting their quality of service (QoS). In this paper, we consider EVs dynamically querying about charging stations along their journeys, and we theorize approximate geo-indistinguishability (AGeoI) on road networks which allows the EVs to obfuscate the individual query locations while keeping them within their preferred area of interest, as journeys are very sensitive to a sharp loss in QoS incurring a high cost to be covered. We propose a novel method to protect the privacy of EVs, both for the individual query locations and against the threat of tracing their journeys, by applying AGeoI that enables the users to substantially preserve their QoS. We lay out an analytical insight on our method and experimentally illustrate that under our method a very high fraction of the EVs attain privacy for free, and, in general, the utility-loss suffered due to gain in privacy is significantly low.
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