Trust and privacy in mobile participatory sensing: Current trends and future challenges

Abstract

Due to the prominent advantages of sensing, processing, and storage resources available in current mobile phones, numerous and unique research challenges arise from mobile participatory sensing paradigm. Nowadays, mobile consumer devices are also increasingly used as personal sensing instruments, where users record their daily habits, track their physical activity, or monitor their health. In the absence of any protection mechanisms, most of these applications may however endanger the privacy of the participants and end users. Consequently, mobile phone users may also reluctant to contribute reliable data to the sensing campaigns and this would affect the relevance of sensing campaigns deployed at large scale as well as limiting the benefits to the users. By empowering people to contribute reliable data and encounter the risk that a user's privacy might be compromised and mechanisms to preserve user privacy are also mandatory. In this survey, we present a brief overview of existing privacy implications used in current participatory sensing applications, analyze different protection goals and assess the threats to user privacy when personal information is sensed and disclosed. We outline the latest trends in the area of trust and privacy in mobile participatory sensing campaigns. Based on our findings, we further provide an overview of current trends and future research challenges in this area.