Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Participatory Sensing: The Tension Between Social Translucence and Privacy

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Trustworthy Internet

Abstract

Participatory sensing is a new research area that emerged from the need to complement our previous efforts in wireless sensor networks. It takes advantage of the emergence of rich-sensor mobile phones and their wide adoption, in order to turn people to producers of sensed data and enable new classes of collective applications. Unavoidably, this raises a lot of privacy concerns, as people are becoming sensors and give out a lot of personal information, like their location. If we choose to protect their privacy by anonymizing the data and completely hiding any identifying information, then the visibility of their contributions to others is lost. However, it is important to maintain this property, in order to support accountability on one hand and allow people gain reputation for their efforts on the other hand. In this book chapter we investigate which of the available technical solutions we need, in order to resolve this conflict and what are the research directions that emerge.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 129.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Burke, J., Estrin, D., Hansen, M., Parker, A., Ramanathan, N., Reddy, S., Srivastava, M.B.: Participatory sensing. In: Workshop on World-Sensor-Web (WSW’06): Mobile Device Centric Sensor Networks and Applications, pp. 117–134, October (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Irwin, A.: Citizen science: a study of people, expertise and sustainable development. Routledge, London (1995)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Paulos, E., Honicky, R., Hooker, B.: Citizen science: enabling participatory urbanism. In: Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City. IGI Global, Hershey (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Campbell, A., Eisenman, S., Lane, N., Miluzzo, E., Peterson, R., Lu, H., Zheng, X., Musolesi, M., Fodor, K., Ahn, G.-S.: The rise of people-centric sensing. IEEE Internet Comput. 12(4), 12–21 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Cuff, D., Hansen, M., Kang, J.: Urban sensing: out of the woods. Commun. ACM 51(3), 24–33 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Lane, N., Miluzzo, E., Lu, H., Peebles, D., Choudhury, T., Campbell, A.: A survey of mobile phone sensing. IEEE Commun. Mag. 48, 140–150 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Miluzzo, E., Lane, N.D., Fodor, K., Peterson, R., Lu, H., Musolesi, M., Eisenman, S.B., Zheng, X., Campbell, A.T.: Sensing meets mobile social networks: the design, implementation and evaluation of the cenceme application. In: Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Embedded Network Sensor Systems (SenSys ’08), pp. 337–350 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Nicolas Maisonneuve, M.S., Ochab, B.: Participatory noise pollution monitoring using mobile phones. Inf. Policy 15, 51–71 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Erickson, T., Kellogg, W.A.: Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes. ACM Trans. Comput.–Hum. Interact. 7(1), 59–83 (2000)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Krontiris, I., Freiling, F.C., Dimitriou, T.: Location privacy in urban sensing networks: research challenges and directions. IEEE Wireless Commun. Mag. 17, 30–35 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Paxton, M.: Participate: producing a mass scale environmental campaign for pervasive technology. In: 6th International Conference on Pervasive Computing (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Kollock, P.: The economies of online cooperation: gifts and public goods in cyberspace. In: Communities in Cyberspace, pp. 220–239 (1999, Chap. 9)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Aguiton, C., Cardon, D.: The strength of weak cooperation: an attempt to understand the meaning of web 2.0. Commun. Strategies 65, 51–65 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Bryant, S.L., Forte, A., Bruckman, A.: Becoming wikipedian: transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia. In: GROUP ’05: Proceedings of the 2005 International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work, pp. 1–10. ACM, New York (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Borning, A., Friedman, B., Davis, J., Lin, P.: Informing public deliberation: value sensitive design of indicators for a large-scale urban simulation. In: Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Resnick, P., Kuwabara, K., Zeckhauser, R., Friedman, E.: Reputation systems. Commun. ACM 43(12), 45–48 (2000)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Mcdonald, D., Ackermann, M.: Just talk to me: a field study of expertise location. In: Proceedings of the 1998 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Chaum, D.: Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms. Commun. ACM 24(2), 84–90 (1981)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Lenhard, J., Loesing, K., Wirtz, G.: Performance measurements of Tor hidden services in low-bandwidth access networks. In: Proceedings of the International Conference of Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS ’09), pp. 324–341, June (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Krontiris, I., Freiling, F.C.: Integrating people-centric sensing with social networks: a privacy research agenda. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Workshop on Security and Social Networking (Sesoc) (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Diaz, C., Troncoso, C., Danezis, G.: Does additional information always reduce anonymity? In: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM Workshop on Privacy in Electronic Society (WPES ’07), pp. 72–75 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Diaz, C., Troncoso, C., Serjantov, A.: On the impact of social network profiling on anonymity. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Chaum, D., van Heyst, E.: Group signatures. In: Advances in Cryptology—EUROCRYPT ’91, pp. 257–265 (1991)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Camenisch, J., Lysyanskaya, A.: Dynamic accumulators and application to efficient revocation of anonymous credentials. In: Advances in Cryptology—CRYPTO 2002, pp. 61–76. Springer, London (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Boneh, D., Shacham, H.: Group signatures with verifier-local revocation. In: Proceedings of the 11th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS ’04), pp. 168–177 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Camenisch, J., Hohenberger, S., Lysyanskaya, A.: Compact e-cash. In: Advances in Cryptology—EUROCRYPT 2005, pp. 302–321 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Camenisch, J., Hohenberger, S., Lysyanskaya, A.: Balancing accountability and privacy using e-cash (extended abstract). In: Proceedings of the 5th Conference of Security and Cryptography for Networks (SCN ’06), pp. 141–155 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Teranishi, I., Furukawa, J., Sako, K.: k-times anonymous authentication. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security (ASIACRYPT ’04), pp. 308–322, December (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Tsang, P.P., Au, M.H., Kapadia, A., Smith, S.W.: BLAC: revoking repeatedly misbehaving anonymous users without relying on TTPs (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  30. Chaum, D.: Blind signature system. In: CRYPTO, p. 153 (1983)

    Google Scholar 

  31. Androulaki, E., Choi, S.G., Bellovin, S.M., Malkin, T.: Reputation systems for anonymous networks. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETS ’08), Leuven, Belgium, pp. 202–218 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  32. Schiffner, S., Clauß, S., Steinbrecher, S.: Privacy and liveliness for reputation systems. In: Proceedings of the 6th European PKI Workshop: Research and Applications (EuroPKI ’09), Pisa, Italy (2009)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledegments

We are grateful to Felix Freiling for the fruitful discussions regarding this work.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chair of Mobile Business and Multilateral Security, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany

    Ioannis Krontiris

Authors
  1. Ioannis Krontiris
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Nicolas Maisonneuve
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ioannis Krontiris .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Information Engineering, University of Brescia, Via Branze 38, Brescia, 25123, Italy

    Luca Salgarelli

  2. , Electronic Engineering, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Via del Politecnico 1, Rome, 00133, Italy

    Giuseppe Bianchi

  3. , Electronic Engineering, University of Rome, Tor Vergata, Via del Politecnico 1, Rome, 00133, Italy

    Nicola Blefari-Melazzi

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2011 Springer-Verlag Italia Srl

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Krontiris, I., Maisonneuve, N. (2011). Participatory Sensing: The Tension Between Social Translucence and Privacy. In: Salgarelli, L., Bianchi, G., Blefari-Melazzi, N. (eds) Trustworthy Internet. Springer, Milano. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-88-470-1818-1_12

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-88-470-1818-1_12

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Milano

  • Print ISBN: 978-88-470-1817-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-88-470-1818-1

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation