Privacy in the age of Pervasive Internet and Big Data Analytics – Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

In the age of pervasive internet where people are communicating, networking, buying, paying bills, managing their health and finances over the internet, where sensors and machines are tracking real-time information and communicating with each other, it is but natural that big data will be generated and analyzed for the purpose of smart business and personalization. Today storage is no longer a bottleneck and the benefit of analysis outweighs the cost of making user profiling omnipresent. However, this brings with it several privacy challenges - risk of privacy disclosure without consent, unsolicited advertising, unwanted exposure of sensitive information and unwarranted attention by malicious interests. We survey privacy risks associated with personalization in Web Search, Social Networking, Healthcare, Mobility, Wearable Technology and Internet of Things. The article reviews current privacy challenges, existing privacy preserving solutions and their limitations. We conclude with a discussion on future work in user controlled privacy preservation and selective personalization, particularly in the domain of search engines.