On the interactions between privacy-preserving, incentive, and inference mechanisms in participatory sensing systems

In Participatory Sensing (PS) systems people agree to utilize their cellular phone resources to sense and transmit the data of interest. Although PS systems have the potential to collect enormous amounts of data to discover and solve new collective problems, they have not been very successful in practice, mainly because of lack of incentives for participation and privacy concerns. Therefore, several incentive and privacy-preserving mechanisms have been proposed. However, these mechanisms have been traditionally studied in isolation overseeing the interaction between them. In this paper we include a model and implement several of these mechanisms to study the interactions and effects that they may have on one another and, more importantly, on the quality of the information that the system provides to the final user. Our experiments show that privacy-preserving mechanisms and incentive mechanisms may in fact affect each other's performance and, more importantly, the quality of the information to the final user.