An information-aware visualization for privacy-preserving accelerometer data sharing

Abstract In the age of big data, plenty of valuable sensing data have been shared to enhance scientific innovation. However, this may cause unexpected privacy leakage. Although numerous privacy preservation techniques, such as perturbation, encryption, and anonymization, have been proposed to conceal sensitive information, it is usually at the cost of the application utility. Moreover, most of the existing works did not distinguished the underlying factors, such as data features and sampling rate, which contribute differently to utility and privacy information implied in the shared data. To well balance the application utility and privacy leakage for data sharing, we utilize mutual information and visualization techniques to analyze the impact of the underlying factors on utility and privacy, respectively, and design an interactive visualization tool to help users identify the appropriate solution to achieve the objectives of high application utility and low privacy leakage simultaneously. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme and tool, accelerometer data collected from mobile devices have been adopted as an illustrative example. Experimental study has shown that feature selection and sampling frequency play dominant roles in reducing privacy leakage with much less reduction on utility, and the proposed visualization tool can effectively recommend the appropriate combination of features and sampling rates that can help users make decision on the trade-off between utility and privacy.