Guest editorial: special issue on trust, privacy, and security in crowdsourcing computing

Crowdsourcing is the process of engaging a crowd to provide services that can take place on many different levels and across various domains. The human-centric and cooperationoriented feature of crowdsourcing prompts us to reexamine the trust, privacy, and security issues in this new paradigm since the individuals in the crowd typically are unfamiliar with each other and usually have different motivation behind participation. The goal of this special issue is to solicit high quality, original research contributions on all aspects of trust, privacy and security on crowdsourcing computing, thereby capturing the state of the art and stimulating further developments in the related areas. This will serve as not only a reference to all researchers working in the area, but also an important resource for the industry, showing the maturity of trust, privacy and security technology and creating an atmosphere for funding new trust, privacy and security projects. Following an open call for papers, we received 26 submissions. Manuscripts passing the initial screening went through a rigorous two-round review process, during which each submission was evaluated by at least two reviewers based on topic relevance, originality of ideas, technical quality, significance of results, and quality of presentation. Finally, we accepted 12 papers. In the following, we will highlight the contributions of each paper. Paper “A Survey of Blockchain Technology on Security, Privacy, and Trust in Crowdsourcing Services” by Ying Ma, Yu Sun, Yunjie Lei, Nan Qin, and Junwen Lu surveys existing blockchain technology to security, privacy, and trust issues in crowdsourcing services from the direction of industry and research, by discussing background knowledge, related concepts and basic models of blockchain, and analysing the current research status and the application of blockchain. The authors summarise the advantages and challenges of World Wide Web (2020) 23:389–391 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-019-00772-z