Internet of Vehicles and Autonomous Connected Car - Privacy and Security Issues

In the Intelligent Vehicle Grid, the car is becoming a formidable sensor platform, absorbing information from the environment, from other cars (and from the driver) and feeding it to other cars and infrastructure to assist in safe navigation, pollution control and traffic management. The Vehicle Grid essentially becomes an Internet of Things (IOT), which we call Internet of Vehicles (IOV), capable to make its own decisions about driving customers to their destinations. Like other important IOT examples (e.g., smart buildings), the Internet of Vehicles will not merely upload data to the Internet using V2I. It will also use V2V communications between peers to complement on board sensor inputs and provide safe and efficient navigation. In this paper, we first describe several vehicular applications that leverage V2V and V2I. Communications with infrastructure and with other vehicles, however, can create privacy and security violations. In the second part of the paper we address these issues and more specifically focus on the need to guarantee location privacy to mobile users. We argue on the importance of creating public, open "smart city" data repositories for the research community and propose privacy preserving techniques for the anonymous uploading of urban sensor data from vehicles.