The Efficiency of Learning Methodology for Privacy Protection in Context-aware Environment during the COVID-19 Pandemic

When the COVID-19 coronavirus hit, the context-aware application users were willing to relax their context privacy preferences during the lockdown to cope their lives while staying home. Such disturbance in the privacy behavior affected the performance of Machine Learning (ML) algorithm that is trained on normal behavior. In this paper, we present the impact of the pandemic on the efficiency of the learning algorithm implementation of a privacy protection system. The system is composed of three modules, in this work we focus on Privacy Preferences Manager (PPM) module which is implemented using hybrid methodology based on a Statistical Model (SM) and Logistic Regression (LR) learning algorithm. The efficiency of the hybrid methodology is assessed using two real-world datasets collected prior and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results show that the pandemic significantly impacted the efficiency of the hybrid methodology by 13.05% and 15.22% for the accuracy and F1 score respectively. (C) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.