Biblio

Recent advances in wireless sensors for personal healthcare allow to recognise human real-time activities with mobile devices. While the analysis of those datastream can have many benefits from a health point of view, it can also lead to privacy threats by exposing highly sensitive information. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving framework for activity recognition. This framework relies on a machine learning technique to efficiently recognise the user activity pattern, useful for personal healthcare monitoring, while limiting the risk of re-identification of users from biometric patterns that characterizes each individual. To achieve that, we first deeply analysed different features extraction schemes in both temporal and frequency domain. We show that features in temporal domain are useful to discriminate user activity while features in frequency domain lead to distinguish the user identity. On the basis of this observation, we second design a novel protection mechanism that processes the raw signal on the user's smartphone and transfers to the application server only the relevant features unlinked to the identity of users. In addition, a generalisation-based approach is also applied on features in frequency domain before to be transmitted to the server in order to limit the risk of re-identification. We extensively evaluate our framework with a reference dataset: results show an accurate activity recognition (87%) while limiting the re-identifation rate (33%). This represents a slightly decrease of utility (9%) against a large privacy improvement (53%) compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

The widespread adoption of Location-Based Services (LBSs) has come with controversy about privacy. While leveraging location information leads to improving services through geo-contextualization, it rises privacy concerns as new knowledge can be inferred from location records, such as home/work places, habits or religious beliefs. To overcome this problem, several Location Privacy Protection Mechanisms (LPPMs) have been proposed in the literature these last years. However, every mechanism comes with its own configuration parameters that directly impact the privacy guarantees and the resulting utility of protected data. In this context, it can be difficult for a non-expert system designer to choose appropriate configuration parameters to use according to the expected privacy and utility. In this paper, we present a framework enabling the easy configuration of LPPMs. To achieve that, our framework performs an offline, in-depth automated analysis of LPPMs to provide the formal relationship between their configuration parameters and both privacy and the utility metrics. This framework is modular: by using different metrics, a system designer is able to fine-tune her LPPM according to her expected privacy and utility guarantees (i.e., the guarantee itself and the level of this guarantee). To illustrate the capability of our framework, we analyse Geo-Indistinguishability (a well known differentially private LPPM) and we provide the formal relationship between its &epsis; configuration parameter and two privacy and utility metrics.