Negative Surveys with Randomized Response Techniques for Privacy-Aware Participatory Sensing

Participatory sensing is an emerging system that allows the increasing number of smartphone users to share effectively the minute statistical information collected by themselves. This system relies on participants' active contribution including intentional input data. However, a number of privacy concerns will hinder the spread of participatory sensing applications. It is difficult for resource-constrained mobile phones to rely on complicated encryption schemes. We should prepare a privacy-preserving participatory sensing scheme with low computation complexity. Moreover, an environment that can reassure participants and encourage their participation in participatory sensing is strongly required because the quality of the statistical data is dependent on the active contribution of general users. In this article, we present MNS-RRT algorithms, which is the combination of negative surveys and randomized response techniques, for preserving privacy in participatory sensing, with high levels of data integrity. By using our method, participatory sensing applications can deal with a data having two selections in a dimension. We evaluated how this scheme can preserve the privacy while ensuring data integrity.