Privacy-Preserving Data Collection in Context-Aware Applications

Thanks to the development and popularity of context-aware applications, the quality of users' life has been improved through a wide variety of customized services. Meanwhile, users are suffering severe risk of privacy leakage and their privacy concerns are growing over time. To tackle the contradiction between the serious privacy issues and the growing privacy concerns in context-aware applications, in this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving data collection scheme by incorporating the complicated interactions among user, attacker, and service provider into a three-antithetic-party game. Under such a novel game model, we identify and rigorously prove the best strategies of the three parties and the equilibriums of the games. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of our proposed data collection game by performing extensive numerical experiments, confirming that the user's data privacy can be effective preserved.