Abstract: Location information contains personal privacy,and the precise location information may disclose users’ hobby,behavior and other sensitive information.Therefore,the protection of location information privacy is very important.The existing methods of generating anonymous area for location privacy protection are mostly based on the k-anonymous algorithms under Euclidean space.Though they can anonymize user’s location in a certain extent,in real life,the location is influenced by the road networks environment seriously,at the same time,the k-anonymous algorithms under Euclidean space do not consider whether the generated anonymous area is still within sensitive region.This paper proposed a method of generating anonymous area for sensitive location protection under road networks.The method is based on space partition.Firstly,it generates the Voronoi cell for the node of road networks according to the demands of road networks L-diversity.Then combined with the sensitivity of the user’s location,it generates the anonymous area for user’s location.The experiment results show that compared with the existing k-anonymous algorithms,this algorithm achieves the goal that the generated anonymous area is not within sensitive region,therefore,it provides better protection for location privacy.

Key words: Voronoi,Anonymous area,Road networks structure,Location sensitivity,Location privacy