Utip-DAM: Utility-Preserving, Decentralized Anonymity of Mobility data

Understanding crowd mobility is crucial for tackling challenges like climate change, urbanization, and disease control. But how do we gain these insights while protecting individual privacy? That’s the mission of our 9-month project, undertaken in partnership and with the financial support of NGI Trustchain.

UtiP-DAM addresses the limitations of existing approaches. Standard anonymization methods can still reveal personal information, and centralized systems require blind trust in the controller. We propose a decentralized solution based on k-anonymity, where data is anonymized on EDGE devices, ensuring that even the controller cannot identify individuals. Additionally, we create auditing and verification tools: one for data controllers to a assess re-identification risks and anonymize their data, and another for individuals and companies to verify if their data is included in public datasets.

The project promotes transparency and trust through decentralization, while k-anonymity safeguards privacy even with linked datasets. Our auditing and verification tools further ensure the anonymized data remains valuable.

Join us in building a future where understanding crowd mobility goes hand-in-hand with individual privacy.

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