Integrating people-centric sensing with social networks: A privacy research agenda

During the last few years there has been an increasing number of people-centric sensing projects, which combine location information with other sensors available on mobile devices, such as the camera, the microphone or the accelerometer, giving birth to a different dimension in sensing our environment compared to the existing wireless sensor networks approach. In this paper, we envision a new scenario, where users develop their own participatory urban sensing projects at a large scale through the use of social networks. Consequently, users can participate in campaigns created by other users, according to their sensitivities and interests, exploiting the existing enormous social interconnections offered by existing social networking tools. We place our primary concern to protecting user privacy and address the need for new solutions in location anonymity and access control under this new complex and dynamic communication paradigm.