Privacy preservation for participatory sensing data

Over the recent years, the proliferation of mobile networking and the increasing capabilities of smartphone devices have led to the development of “Participatory Sensing” applications, where users actively participate in data collection and sharing in a wide range of application domains from entertainment, to transportation, to environmental monitoring. One important challenge in these settings is privacy preservation for participatory sensing data, such as user trajectories. This paper develops a participatory sensing system for Android smartphones and proposes an efficient approach for privacy preservation which enables users to disclose their trajectory information without compromising their privacy. Existing approaches for privacy-aware data sharing operate under the assumption that user data is maintained in a centralized database. In our work we assume that user data is generated and stored locally on the individual smartphone devices. Our technique is distributed and low cost. We present detailed experimental results to illustrate that our approach is practical, efficient and with low overhead.