Privacy-Preserving Competitive Detour Tasking in Spatial Crowdsourcing

Spatial crowdsourcing (SC) has recently emerged as a new crowdsourcing service paradigm, where workers move physically to designated locations to perform tasks. Most SC systems perform task assignment based on the spatial proximity between task locations and worker locations. Under such a strategy, workers can only perform tasks near them, which may result in low social welfare (i.e., the total profit of the platform and workers). In contrast, the newly emerging strategy of competitive task assignment (CTA) stimulates workers to compete for their preferred tasks, allowing optimization of the overall profit of SC systems. Among others, one novel CTA setting is competitive detour tasking, which allows workers to compete for tasks that need them to make detours from their original travel paths. However, it requires collecting each worker’s bidding profile which may expose private information. In light of this, in this article, we design, implement, and evaluate PrivCO, a new system framework enabling privacy-preserving competitive detour tasking services in SC. PrivCO delicately bridges state-of-the-art competitive detour tasking algorithms with lightweight cryptography, providing strong protections for workers’ bidding profiles. Extensive experiments over real-world datasets demonstrate that while offering strong security guarantees, PrivCO achieves social welfare comparable to the plaintext domain.