A Survey on Trajectory Privacy in Participatory Sensing Applications

The predominance of GPS equipped mobile and navigation devices results in the accumulation of huge trajectory data in a massive scale. The collection and distribution of these huge trajectory data may jeopardize the privacy of the participators. By knowing and tracking the user trajectories by the malicious parties could possibly endanger the user’s private information like religious habits, daily routines, health issues etc. The fear of privacy leakage may certainly to have a rethink among the participators for being the part of participatory sensing system and this will surely degrade the success of the system. In this survey, we identify the various participatory sensing privacy protection methods used in the existing participatory sensing applications and also analyses the threats from the adversaries that may affect the user privacy. We also investigate and discuss the effectiveness of various existing trajectory privacy preserving methods and checks the suitability of these methods in real-world situations. As a concluding part, we suggest the possible solutions to counter the open issues and maximize the privacy of participators in this system.