Impenetrable obscurity vs. informed decisions: privacy solutions for Participatory Sensing

By harnessing sensors embedded in personal end devices, Participatory Sensing enables novel applications, but also raises severe privacy concerns. Instead of using existing centralized privacy mechanisms that remain obscure to the participants, we propose to involve the participants themselves into the process to protect privacy by interacting directly with others users using their available sensors. Furthermore, our decentralized solution helps in limiting the dissemination of sensitive data, which eliminates some threats to privacy.