On Designing Privacy-Aware Data Upload Mechanism -- Towards Information-Gathering System for Disasters

A key issue for an organization that is responsible for disaster and emergency management becomes how to gather reliable and useful information during a major disaster. We consider an information-gathering platform for large-scale disasters and emergencies based on mobile terminals. A simple solution to realize an information-gathering system is to construct a server where information is uploaded and published. However, such a centralized approach is not flexible nor is it robust. For example, it is very hard to find an appropriate system to which the user can upload information during a disaster, and the centralized server may be down because of overload or has been physically destroyed. We must consider a distributed and dynamic architecture for the system. Security and privacy issues are another concern that should be addressed for providing information from user´s mobile terminals. We focus on a design of a privacy preserving data upload mechanism for the information-gathering system. We design the mechanism that accommodates privacy requirements and present a feasibility analysis of the mechanism.