• Proposes PPDO, a privacy-preservation-aware delay optimization task-offloading algorithm for collaborative edge computing systems.
• Introduces a privacy task model that obfuscates location and usage pattern data to protect user privacy against edge servers.
• Leverages an MDP policy-iteration framework to minimize task offloading delay while maintaining privacy constraints.
• Demonstrates through EUA dataset simulations that PPDO achieves an optimal privacy–delay trade-off and lower delay than existing algorithms.