Olympus: Sensor Privacy through Utility Aware Obfuscation

Abstract

Abstract Personal data garnered from various sensors are often offloaded by applications to the cloud for analytics. This leads to a potential risk of disclosing private user information. We observe that the analytics run on the cloud are often limited to a machine learning model such as predicting a user’s activity using an activity classifier. We present Olympus, a privacy framework that limits the risk of disclosing private user information by obfuscating sensor data while minimally affecting the functionality the data are intended for. Olympus achieves privacy by designing a utility aware obfuscation mechanism, where privacy and utility requirements are modeled as adversarial networks. By rigorous and comprehensive evaluation on a real world app and on benchmark datasets, we show that Olympus successfully limits the disclosure of private information without significantly affecting functionality of the application.