Anonymization Techniques for Preserving Data Quality in Participatory Sensing

Participatory sensing is a revolutionary new paradigm where citizens voluntarily sense their surroundings using readily available sensing devices such as mobile phones and share this information for mutual benefit of community members. To encourage ample participation of users, ensuring their privacy is inevitable. Existing techniques that attempt to protect location privacy with spatial cloaking suffer from irrecoverable data quality degradation. To the best of our knowledge, very few works provided a solution preserving high data quality/utility at the destination server, however, suffered from unacceptable computational overhead. This paper presents an improved deterministic alternative and also a faster variant by exploiting several optimization issues. Theoretical formulations and extensive simulation results are presented to establish the applicability of our proposed techniques.