Comparison among Cooperation, Anonymity and Cloak Area approaches for Preserving Privacy of IoT

As a result of the importance of privacy at present, especially with the modern applications and technologies that have spread in the last decade, many techniques and methods have appeared to preserve privacy and protect users' data from tracking, profiling, or identification. The most popular of these technologies are those which rely on peer-to-peer or third-party cooperation. But, by reviewing a significant portion of existing research articles related to privacy, we find considerable confusion amongst several concepts and ways of protection, such as the concept of cloak area, Anonymizer, cooperation, and Third Party Peers (TTP). In this research, we revisit and review these approaches, which contain an overlap between them to distinguish each one clearly with the help of graphs and to remove their ambiguity. In this way, we shall be able provide a ready-reckoner to those interested in this field to easily differentiate between them and thus work to develop them and provide new methods. In other words, this research seeks to enhance the privacy and security in smart applications and technologies in the IoT and smart city environments.