Privacy Issues in Urban Computing using Mobile Crowdsensing

Urban computing is an exciting area of research with huge amount of urban data being generated every day. Citizens however put their privacy at stake, while generously trying to share data with the society. Nowadays, smart phone is the most common and convenient method of data capture, which has given rise to an emerging paradigm called Mobile Crowdsensing. This work discusses the features of mobile crowdsensing and focuses on the privacy issues in this method of data capture. The work studies privacy threats arising from different sensors and analyses the requirements for privacy. The main contribution of this paper is detailed analysis of how different sensors in the smartphone can unknowingly compromise the user’s privacy and reveal his/her lifestyle and routine activities.