Chapter 5 Privacy , Trust and Incentives in Participatory Sensing

In this chapter, we study the socioeconomic issues that can arise in distributed computing environments such as distributed and open, participatory sensing systems. Due to the decentralized nature of such systems, they present many challenges, some of which are equally socioeconomic and technical in essence. Three such major challenges arise in participatory sensing, one economic and two social. The economic problem is centered around the provision of incentives. How can participants be provided with incentives to ensure that they contribute to the system; that they provide sensed data when requested; and take part in various sensing activities? The social problems are related to issues of Trust and Privacy. Trust issues revolve around determining which participants send accurate and truthful data and consequently which participants could be deemed more reliable. Privacy issues revolve around the fact that participants by taking an active part in sensing campaigns, risk exposing private details about themselves, such as their location at particular points in time. In practice all three challenges are interlinked. For example, in order to ensure participants privacy, a system could provide anonymization of the users’ identity. However, given that every node/participant is anonymized, it becomes harder to put in place an effective trust mechanism, which requires the identification of both trustworthy nodes and malicious/unreliable ones. In the same vein, system designers can use incentive schemes to incentivize users to sacrifice their privacy so that an efficient trust mechanism could be put in place.