A Context-Aware Privacy Scheme for Crisis Situations

Participatory sensing allows individuals and groups to contribute to an application using their handheld sensor devices. Data collected from participants including their location, time, contacts, etc. are vital to the accuracy of the application but are considered private to the participants. The design of a successful participatory sensing application must consider the challenge of the accuracy-privacy trade-off. In more critical situations when a crisis occurs, however, the accuracy-privacy trade-off becomes more complex. When a participant is at risk, data accuracy becomes more important than participant's privacy. In this paper, we propose a Context-Aware Privacy (CAP) scheme. CAP aims to provide privacy-preserved data to authorized recipients based on the status of participants. Depending on the recipient category, their role and policies enforced, a different level of participants' private data may be received. Experimental results show that the CAP scheme achieves a high level of privacy protection in safe areas. In risk areas/situations the scheme achieves a higher level of data accuracy than existing privacy schemes.