A
road pricing smart client and method for a
road pricing system enabling the removal of information from the positioning data describing the itinerary which suggest private data such as travelling speed and itinerary of the originator of the data. Accordingly, the
smart client and method is configured to re-sample the original positioning points of the
route into
equidistant sections, remove timing information from the positioning data, slice the re-sampled
route into slices shaped as those provided by other road users by employing a common “virtual grid”. By transmitting the slices in randomized order with an arbitrary
delay, coherence of slices corresponding to formerly neighboring portions of the itinerary, are not correlated anymore. However, there is still enough information provided to the
toll system to send an excerpt of the fee
database allowing the smart pricing
client or method to calculate the occurred fees.The main
advantage of the
smart client and method is that it delegates in a secure and privacy-preserving way the costly operations to the external
toll server proxy. Thus, storage of digital maps in the
client is not required, and tariff updates are only transmitted when necessary in a way that preserves privacy. Finally the data transmitted by the smart
client can be preprocessed and compressed in order to remove all unnecessary personal information, thereby reducing the bandwidth requirements on the telecommunication network. Further, the proposed solution enables to raise statistics on road usage, i.e. traffic appearance by road-section without endangering privacy of the individual road users.