Privacy Risk Mitigation Strategies for Drone Package Delivery

Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, are increasingly used to deliver goods. In an emerging business model, a drone operator partners with multiple businesses to offer drone delivery as a service. Due to regulations requiring drones to broadcast position information, this business model results in a privacy risk: Third-party observers may use broadcast drone trajectories to link customers to the vendors from which they order, with a wide range of potential consequences. We propose a probabilistic definition of privacy risk based on the likelihood of inferring which customer receives a delivery from which vendor. Next, we quantify these risks and evaluate the impacts of the number of orders, drone capacity, decoy vendors, and delivery lime time requirements on privacy. We then discuss how privacy risk may be integrated into the vehicle routing problem or explicitly optimized on its own. Finally, we show the geographical dependence of the trade-off between privacy and efficiency.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Ding, Geoffrey

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Balakrishnan, Hamsa

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/151216

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/151216