Classification of participatory sensing privacy schemes

Participatory sensing is a revolutionary new paradigm that offers individuals and interest groups the opportunity to contribute to an application using their sensor equipped handheld devices. However, one of the main challenges that threatens the success of participatory sensing systems is “privacy.” Data collected from participants´ devices such as location, time, phone number, etc. are considered private. The collected data should not accidentally reveal any of the contributors´ private information. This paper studies the proposed solutions pertaining to ease that challenge in participatory sensing privacy. The main contribution here is classifying the mainstream schemes in participatory sensing privacy based on our classification attributes. Moreover, we propose novel attributes that lay the foundation for privacy preserving sensing schemes in participatory sensing systems.