Privacy-Preserving Ride Sharing Scheme for Autonomous Vehicles in Big Data Era

Ride sharing can reduce the number of vehicles in the streets by increasing the occupancy of vehicles, which can facilitate traffic and reduce crashes and the number of needed parking slots. Autonomous vehicles can make ride sharing convenient, popular, and also necessary because of the elimination of the driver effort and the expected high cost of the vehicles. However, the organization of ride sharing requires the users to disclose sensitive detailed information not only on the pick-up/drop-off locations but also on the trip time and route. In this paper, we propose a scheme to organize ride sharing and address the unique privacy issues. Our scheme uses a similarity measurement technique over encrypted data to preserve the privacy of trip data. The ride sharing region is divided into cells and each cell is represented by one bit in a binary vector. Each user should represent trip data as binary vectors and submit the encryptions of the vectors to a server. The server can measure the similarity of the users' trip data and find users who can share rides without knowing the data. Our analysis has demonstrated that the proposed scheme can organize ride sharing without disclosing private information. We have implemented our scheme using Visual C on a real map and the measurements have confirmed that our scheme is effective when ride sharing becomes popular and the server needs to organize a large number of rides in short time.