Privacy-preserving participatory sensing

The proliferation of mobile devices such as smart phones has enabled participatory sensing systems that collect data from users through their mobile devices and infer useful information from the data. However, users have concerns regarding possible privacy leakage from their data and lack incentives to contribute their data. To effectively motivate users to participate, both privacy and incentive issues need to be addressed. In this article, we address how to simultaneously protect privacy and provide incentives for participatory sensing. We review previous approaches, discuss their limitations, and propose new approaches for two types of participatory sensing systems.