[ezwoodland]

Depends on if the independent events are uncorrelated. For example, if they had to be quantized to a grid of length 1750ft and quantized sufficiently in time as well, it might be impossible to average out since the various data points provide no new information.

[seanhunter]

This is why I posted the k-anonymity paper. A dataset is k-anonymous if using the dataset is is not possible to distinguish a given person in the dataset from k other people. Then we set a value of k we feel comfortable with and from that we can back into the areas which intuitively you would think would need to vary in size based on time of day and how many people travel through each area in the dataset.

It’s a lot of work but this is what you need to do to guarantee a given (non-zero) level of privacy. It can be done if people are serious about it.