SensorSafe: A Framework for Privacy-Preserving Management of Personal Sensory Information

With the wide-spread use of mobile smartphones and bodyworn sensors, continuous collection of sensor data about individuals becomes feasible, and many useful applications such as medical behavioral studies, personal health-care, and participatory sensing have emerged. Such applications have important privacy implications due to their nature of sharing personal sensor data. In addition, what is shared is not only the raw sensor data but also the information that can be inferred from the data, which raises more privacy concerns of users. This paper proposes SensorSafe, an architecture for managing such personal sensory information in a privacy-preserving way. Our architecture consists of multiple remote data stores and a broker so users can retain the ownership of their data and management of multiple users can be well supported. SensorSafe also provides a fine-grained access control mechanism by which users can define their own sharing rules based on various conditions including context and behavioral status. Users define their privacy preferences and review their data by using our webbased user interface. We discuss our implementation of the SensorSafe architecture and provide application examples to show how our system can support user privacy. Our performance evaluation results demonstrate that building applications using the SensorSafe architecture is feasible so user privacy can be better protected.