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conference paper

On (The Lack Of) Location Privacy in Crowdsourcing Applications

Boukoros, Spyros
•
Humbert, Mathias  
•
Katzenbeisser, Stefan
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January 1, 2019
Proceedings Of The 28Th Usenix Security Symposium
28th USENIX Security Symposium

Crowdsourcing enables application developers to benefit from large and diverse datasets at a low cost. Specifically, mobile crowdsourcing (MCS) leverages users' devices as sensors to perform geo-located data collection. The collection of geo-located data raises serious privacy concerns for users. Yet, despite the large research body on location privacy-preserving mechanisms (LPPMs), MCS developers implement little to no protection for data collection or publication. To understand this mismatch, we study the performance of existing LPPMs on publicly available data from two mobile crowdsourcing projects. Our results show that well-established defenses are either not applicable or offer little protection in the MCS setting. Additionally, they have a much stronger impact on applications' utility than foreseen in the literature. This is because existing LPPMs, designed with location-based services (LBSs) in mind, are optimized for utility functions based on users' locations, while MCS utility functions depend on the values (e.g., measurements) associated with those locations. We finally outline possible research avenues to facilitate the development of new location privacy solutions that fit the needs of MCS so that the increasing number of such applications do not jeopardize their users' privacy.

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Type
conference paper
Web of Science ID

WOS:000509775000106

Author(s)
Boukoros, Spyros
Humbert, Mathias  
Katzenbeisser, Stefan
Troncoso, Carmela  
Date Issued

2019-01-01

Publisher

USENIX ASSOC

Publisher place

Berkeley

Published in
Proceedings Of The 28Th Usenix Security Symposium
ISBN of the book

978-1-939133-06-9

Start page

1859

End page

1876

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LDS  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
28th USENIX Security Symposium

Santa Clara, CA

Aug 14-16, 2019

Available on Infoscience
February 20, 2020
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/166387
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